But there is little time for rejoicing. We must now:
Take the chassis apart.
Cut the chassis to make the robot fit into the box.
Shift the gear boxes towards the back two wheels.
Compact the electronics system.
Create a final design for the ball-handling
Re-construct.
Program for tank drive and arcade drive.
DRIVE DRIVE DRIVE
As you can see, we have quite the work cut out for us. That’s why we’re going to meet again in Mr. Kumura’s workplace this Sunday and Monday (MLK day). The schedule is as follows:
Sunday: from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Monday: from 8:00 AM to 5:00/6:00 PM
We hosted a kickoff event at our high school on January 3rd. We had about 1000 people from local teams attending. It ran very smoothly and without serious problems.
We will soon have a page with specific details and thoughts about the competition here.
Since the challenge is now released, we will be meeting daily to finish the build soon and have lots of time to practice. Although we do not expect everyone to be at every meeting, we expect you to be there on Wednesdays and at least one additional meeting a week.
Also, here are some scholarships for FIRST participants that you may be interested in.
Since we are hosting kickoff, volunteers are needed for the following times.
Event preparation the day before : 5pm-9pm Friday the 2nd
Early morning setup: 5am-6:30am Saturday 3rd
Kickoff
January 3rd, 6:30am-12:00 pm
Interlake High School (16245 NE 24th ST Bellevue, WA 98008)
Please attend for as much of this event as possible. The challange itself will be announced around 7:00am. This is the most important part of kickoff, so if you can only be here for part of the time, try to make it then. We will have a meeting afterward to discuss build designs.
Etymology of latin name (Lampris guttatus): Lampris (family lampridae) comes from greek word for ‘clear,’ lampros.
Common names include 月魚, Akamanbô, Kingfish, Sunfish, Spotted moonfish, Jerusalem haddock, and opah. Maybe sunfish indicates some sort of solar component?
Opah is almost never actively fished for, although its meat is considered good to eat, particularly when smoked. The fish is most often caught incidentaly by fisherman hunting swordfish and and tuna. Opah are very solitary and appear to range across the entire ocean freely. No scientific study has ever observed a living specimen and no aquarium displays them. Perhaps the solitary nature of the fish is related to the team dynamics for the game? (which i just lost btw)
Family lampridae is one of seven families in order lampriforme.
The first hint for the 2009 competition has been released here.
An Opah Fish is this year's game hint
It was identified to be an Opah fish by this Chief Delphi thread, which is the largest discussion about the hint. The Wikipedia article on Opah fish is here.
As always, the hint is very obscure, so there is no certainty overwhat it means.
-Some first thoughts were “Water Game!”, which has been anticipated for a while, but setting up an arena with water in it would be difficult. Personally, I doubt this because if it was a water game, the hint would not be so obvious.
-There is some text in the background that can be seen with increased contrast, but that may be the other side of the page from which this picture was scanned from.
-Someone mentioned that the colors of this fish are the same colors as the FIRST logo, so this could be a connection, but means nothing.
-The image was taken from this site, which is the first thing that comes up when one google image searches “moonfish”. That is a site that sells fish, and it says that moonfish weigh 30-50kgs. This is 66-110lbs, which is reasonable for a weight limit on the robot.
The featured post gallery visible above is pretty intuitive to use. The ‘featured’ category is used to identify featured content. Do not categorize non-featured posts with this, as the gallery displays all that do. Creating a background image for the gallery is easy as well: go to the ‘custom fields’ tab below the text editor while writing the post and select ‘Feature Image’ from the dropdown menu. Then, simply paste the URL of the desired image into the Value field and click Add Custom Field.
