Hello everyone,
The VEX team not only constructed a fantastic robot to compete in this year’s competition, they have written a number of essays as well! We have a good chance this season, but we need everyone to vote in the VEX web, video and essay competitions this week! Hopefully, we can win an award for at least one!

VOTING INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Register an account at http://forum.robotevents.com/register.php
a. Type in your user name, password and e-mail address
b. Type in the verification code
c. Click “Complete Registration”
2. Log in to your new account here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/
a. Click the “LOGIN” button in the upper right hand corner of the page.
b. You may already be logged in after registering.
3. Vote for our video
a. Visit the following link to view our promotional video: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1189
b. Push the play button on the video link at the bottom of the page.
c. Under “Entry Voting” on the right hand of the page, drag the three red sliders to give us a score. The farther right you drag, the more points it gives us. Please give us a high rating.
d. Finally, click “Submit” to send your score.
4. Vote for our website
a. Visit the following link to view our website: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1426
b. Click the “Saints Robotics” link under the category named “Entry Files” to visit our website: http://saintsrobotics.com
c. Under “Entry Voting” on the right hand of the page, drag the three red sliders to give us a score. Please rate our website high.
d. Click “Submit”
5. Click the “LOGOUT” button at the top of the page.

Register here: http://forum.robotevents.com/register.php
Vote for our video here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1189
Vote for our website here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1426
Vote for Larry’s essay here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1021
Vote for Kevin Tam’s essay here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/1171
Vote for Isaku’s essay here: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/entry/detail/13

Congratulations to the VEX team for being the alliance captain of the finalist alliance at the Sandy High School tournament today!

Thank you to all who entered the VEX challenges. We had a team website entry, and team promotional video, and about 4-6 essays. If all goes well, we can win up to $2000 worth of parts. Wish us luck!

“Interlake High School ninth graders Dennis Liao (foreground) and Eric Sun (directly behind him) and 12th grader Edward Jiang (behind Eric) watch as their robot, The Omnibot, goes through its moves, lifting blocks and dropping them at different goals spots. The three Bellevue students are part of the only team from the state selected to go to an international robotics competition Wednesday in Dallas. The team of about 34 studetns built tabletop-size robots designed to pick up blocks. All five of the team’s robots qualified for the international competition, which will feature 280 robots from 12 countries”

The Vex team has appeared in the Monday issue of the Seattle Times! If you have a copy, please save it – the picture is on the back of the “NW News” section.

Tomorrow, the Vex team will leave for the Vex Worlds tournament in Dallas, TX! The competition will be from Thursday-Saturday.

If you’d like to watch the Vex competition from Seattle, you can view it on NASA’s website: http://robotics.nasa.gov/

As the Vex team nears worlds, the meeting schedule is ramping up! If you’re not part of Vex, you’re still welcome to join us in our meetings at Lexis Nexis (2445 140th Ave NE, Suite B200, Bellevue, WA 98005).

Also, Mr. Cooney got back with the field trip status. Basically, this trip will have similar status to any other out of school activity. As a result, you’ll need to get a note from your parents and get the attendance office to give you a prearranged absense form. Do this soon!

Wednesday 4:30-6:30: Programming Autonomous and Driver Practice (optional)

Thursday 4:30-9: Driver Practice

Saturday 10-6: Scrimage

Sunday 12-5: Scrimage

Monday 5-8:30: Scrimage, and Team Meeting (to discuss the trip details) MANDATORY Parent meeting at 7-8

Tuesday 5-7: Final Packing Session, additional trip details.

Wednesday: DALLAS BABY!

The Vex team prepared two videos to submit to the Vex video challenges – and would like Saints Robotics to critique the videos! We’d appreciate the comments =]

Vex Team 1899 Promo Video – Our entry for the Vex Robotics Team Promo Video

Trashbot 1899 – Our entry for the Product Design Challenge

Thanks!

Every year, the FRC organisers try to create a fun event near the competition’s area for the team members to participate in. This year, the social is at the Pacific Science Center. Kevin Ross sent us the following email:

Hello,

Friday evening March 27th, 2009 from 6pm to around 10pm, we have options for your teams entertainment. We have an organized team social at the Pacific Science Center. The Pacific Science Center is a facility on the same grounds as Key Arena in Seattle. It is about a 1500 foot walk from Key Arena to the PacSci.

We have secured access to the Eames IMAX theater, the Laserium, and also the Boeing IMAX theater.  There will only be about 1200 tickets available for this event.

All of these events are on the Seattle Center property. Food is available at the Center House food court, or any one of a number of surrounding area restaurants. You will be responsible for your own food.

We will be showing two Laserium shows, two IMAX films, and have 400 tickets to the new animated movie Monsters vs Aliens. The least expensive ticket allows your team to hang out at the Pacific Science Centers Boeing Lobby where we will have an area for the teams to socialize, plus see 1 laser show and 1 IMAX movie in the EAMES theater. The higher price ticket gets you into Monsters vs Aliens 3D plus 1 additional show.

Doors to the PacSci will open around 6pm for FIRST students. The schedule looks like:

Laser Shows: 6:15 pm, 7:00 pm, 7:45 pm, 8:30 pm (30 minute shows)

IMAX Movies: 6:15 pm, 7:15 pm, 8:15 pm, 9:15 pm (45 minute shows)

Monsters vs Aliens: 7:30pm  www.monstersvsaliens.com (about 100 minutes)

We have use of the Boeing IMAX lobby area from 6pm to 9pm. This will be a good place for the students to mix.

Cost: Admission to the team social will be $7.00 per person, which allows you to attend any of the laser and IMAX movies. If you are one of the 400 people who wish to attend the Monsters vs Aliens, there is an additional $5 per person charge ($12 per person total). The ticket agency adds a little to this price, so the real prices are $8.17 and $13.29. These are the advanced purchase prices. If you wait until the day of, the prices will be $9 and $14 respectively.

It is highly probably that this event will sell out. We apologize for that, but it is difficult to find places for more than 1200 students to hang out!

Another option if you are looking is the Experience Music Project has an event called EMP After Hours. You can find information about this event at http://www.empsfm.org/programs/index.asp?categoryID=249 . FIRST and FIRSTWA are not associated with this event. It is an event open to the public.

Advanced tickets are on sale now via Brown Paper Tickets (an online ticket vendor). All tickets are will call, and will be distributed on Friday of the event in the pit area. Advanced ticket sales are until about 4pm PST on Thursday, March 26th 2009. For this event, we can only handle credit cards for advanced sales, and cash for onsite sales. We WILL NOT process purchase orders.

To purchase tickets, visit http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/60323 

Feel free to contact me with questions.

Kevin

FRC Microsoft Seattle Regional Chairmam

If you can come, please respond to this post.

1899 Vex Team Picture

Congrats to the Vex team for their amazing accomplishments yesterday at the 2009 Washington Vex Competition! We finished the preliminaries with a 4-2 win record, ending in 5th place. We also managed to achieve 3rd place in the driver challenge with a score of 48.

During the finalist rounds, Team 420 “Mousebot”, 3rd place, picked us as an alliance partner. We accepted along with Team 690. Unfortunately, in our first match, Mousebot had some technical difficulties and was disabled during the round, so we lost. Mousebot fixed their technical problems, but 690 was subbed in for round two. Unfortunately, they lost and our alliance was eliminated.

However, we did surprisingly well for a first-year Vex team with only two weeks to build a robot. I’d like to point out some of the things we did really well. First, we had presets for our arm. That means that our drivers didn’t have to waste time getting the arm height correct for each goal – the robot assisted the driver to score. This is a good use of automation to help perform tasks and resulted in less time to score. Also, we had a few hours of driver practice at Exothermic’s field, which gave us an edge over some teams which did less driving.

Also, we got lots of good scouting practice. Over the course of 6 hours or so, we managed to obtain over 1700 words of scouting data! We used a good system and will definitely do that during FRC.

Vex team, Dennis will be leading the disassembly of Ctrl-C. We’ll most likely keep the base so that it will become a towing bot for our trailer.

4-7 at LexisNexis – Vex meeting – we’ll be driving, coding, and nothing else. Mandatory for drivers, optional for everyone else. See you there!

Thanks for everyone who has shown up for the Wednesday meeting today. Vex is doing well. The rest of our meetings (besides the Wednesday meeting) will be held with the Exothermic Robotics at LexisNexis, 2445 140th Ave NE, Suite B200, Bellevue, WA 98005. Here’s our schedule:

• Saturday: 10-6
• Sunday: 12-6
• Tuesday: 4-7
• Wednesday: 5-9
• Thursday: 4-9

I can help provide rides after school. You do not have to be present at all of these meetings, but the more the merrier. Over the weekend, we will make our arm perfected, modify the robot so that there can be two drivers, polish up some rough areas, and get some programming done for the sensors. Over the weekdays, we will do some extensive driving to get experience, strategizing, and make design modifications as necessary. It should be fairly relaxing.

This will culminate in our competition at Redmond High on Saturday, March 14th. I’ll post more info about that soon. Thanks for the great work, team!

Hey guys. Since the general email didn’t work very well, I would like to remind all those that did not write to me about going to the competition to do so ASAP so that we may know some accurate data. If you have already told me, you don’t have to again.

The competition is march 26-28 (Thursday-Saturday) at Key Arena and we would like to know if you want to stay at a hotel or not. Please send an email to ma-fontenelle@hotmail.com and tell me. Officers too, please.

Thanks,

Marc-Antoine