Thanks to everyone who showed up for the Vex meeting today! If you missed it due to the AMC, read up – we have some important things coming up.

We will be travelling to the LexisNexis Bellevue office tomorrow for a field trip to visit Redmond High’s “Exothermic” Robotics.  This will occur from 4-7PM – you can leave from LexisNexis early if you wish. The address is 2445 140th Ave NE, Suite B200, Bellevue, WA 98005. They’ll have snacks & refreshments so you won’t be hungry. At LexisNexis, we’ll be talking to Exothermic Robotics about our robot design, strategies, and parts. We’ll meet in the commons at 4PM at Interlake High. This is pretty important, so make your best effort to show up. Please leave a comment to let me know of your status, so I can plan for transportation.

We’ll also be meeting at Dennis’s house over the weekends. We’ll have a weekend meeting from 8-5 on Sunday.

Homework: As part of the Vex team, you’ll need to read some materials. I’ll be assigning less than 15 minutes of reading daily, so it should not be hard to keep up. Before tomorrow’s meeting with Exothermic, I would like everyone to read chapters 1 and 2 of the Vex Inventor’s guide. Eric, our rules expert, should read through the rules manuals by Sunday. Dennis, our logistics expert, should familiarize himself with different Vex parts (wait until after the meeting tomorrow – you’ll see a lot of parts tomorrow). If you haven’t already, watch the Vex video.

Links:

Vex Inventor’s Guide – Chapter 1 Introduction – Chapter 2 Structure – Chapter 3 Motion – Chapter 4 Power – Chapter 5 Sensors – Chapter 6 Control – Chapter 7 Logic

Vex Competition Information (videos, rules, specifications)

Vex Competition Parts

Thanks for all who showed up to today’s meeting to help clean up! As we get closer to the FRC competition on March 26-28, there are a few things we need to start thinking about:

Hotels

The FRC competition is in Seattle. However, as it is over several days, many of us will be staying in a hotel. You should start thinking about if you will be staying at a hotel or staying at home.

Spirit Gear

We should start thinking about buying things to show our school spirit at the competitions. Start thinking about them and start sharing ideas soon.

Vex Robotics

There seems to be some interest for Vex Robotics. At today’s meeting, both Angelas, Larry, Darian, Dominic, and Eric expressed interest. I believe that Kevin, Vivek, Dennis, Teresa, and a few others showed interest during the monday meeting. If we do Vex, we need to decide whether or not we will participate in the upcoming competition at Redmond High. The competition is on March 14th, so we will have an effective build season of around three weeks. However, the robot will be much smaller and thus easier to build. If you are willing to show the dedication and put in the time needed to build the robot, it should work out just fine.

Sorry for the late notice, but Mr. Eden has stepped up to the occasion and will be our mentor for the meeting. As such, the meeting on Wednesday the 18th will be in session. Hugo is out sick, so Kevin Kimura will be running the meeting.

Tasks for Wednesday:

• Finish the list of spare parts
• Inventory of tools for competition

This is an announcement to SR Members that there will be no meeting tomrrow, Wednesday 18th. Mr. Cooney is sick, and Mr. Moore can’t come, so we don’t have an advisor for our club on that day.

Just wondering – who here is interested in VEX Robotics? I showed people the video on Sunday and Monday at the Robotics meetings, and Redmond Robotics came to STI Optronics to show us their VEX robots last Monday. See the video on youtube. Post a comment on this if you’re interested!

Thanks to everyone who participated in the Saturday meeting today! We definitely got a lot done on our robot “Freshman 15″.

Objectives Accomplished

• Finished conveyor belt contraption
• Mounted conveyor belt
• Reduced weight by 10 lbs
  • Front door removed, some excess support cut off, and two huge trapezoids cut out of the frame.

The robot is currently at 130 lbs, ten pounds overweight. Tomorrow, we will be working as hard as possible to reduce the weight by another ten pounds.

Tomorrow’s Objectives

• Reduce the weight by 10 lbs
• Program the robot
• Begin testing the robot

Reducing the weight will take quite some effort. Tomorrow, we will split up into three groups to reduce weight. Group 1 will remove the back panel with the electronics and remount the electronics on to a lighter piece of wood. Group 2 will take the frame of the robot and cut holes in it to reduce additional weight. Group 3 will unmount the conveyor belt contraption and reduce the weight there.

Robotics Mission

I’d also like a chance to talk about Robotics’ mission. What you get out of Robotics is directly proportional to what you put in to it. Like we learned from Dean Kaman’s speech during the opening session, Robotics is not about winning, it’s about learning. Thus, I encourage everyone to try to participate and learn about the robot by working on it. Whether you drill a hole, cut a piece of wood, or help another student work on the robot, take initiative and do something.

Today, we had an incident where a student was discouraged by a mentor from working on the robot. Leadership has talked to the mentors involved and will attempt to make sure that similar situations do not happen again. Tomorrow, we will try to ensure that everyone is involved with the build process. However, we do need your active participation to accomplish this goal. We encourage you to take risks. If you never used the jigsaw, try using it for the first time. If you make a mistake, don’t worry about it – it’s part of the learning process.

The leadership and mentors are here to teach you skills useful not only for building a robot, but useful skills about the design process, engineering, power tools, and working as a team. We want to build an encouraging environment, not a discouraging environment. This weekend is your last opportunity to work on our competition robot. As such, I encourage you to come to our two weekend meetings to learn, build, and most importantly, have fun!

Sorry about the duplicate email – Hotmail users were having problems with font sizes – it should be fixed now.

Robotics will be using the website for more communication from now on – and so email announcements will now be sent directly from the website.

To prevent emails from being marked as spam, I suggest that everyone add noreply@saintsrobotics.com to their address book. Simply reply to this email with a blank message to do so.

All replies should be made as a comment on the site instead of a “reply all” to the email.

Thanks!

Officers:

To send an announcement, just log into the Saints Robotics website, compose a new post, and click “publish” when you’re done. An announcement will be sent just six minutes after you click “publish” (this is to prevent you from accidentally sending an email or gives you time to correct typos in your announcement).