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!
I edited the new flag and t-shirt design.
The fleurs and shield are now larger and it’s in two colors (helps save $$$ this way)
The flag is going to be the horizontal one and the t-shirt the vertical unless anyone has any suggestions.
If the colors for any reason seem messed up, please give me your email and I’ll send you the designs.
Thanks everyone ^^
~Angela (w/ the teddy)
New Shirt Design:
New Flag Design:
Our meetings have been going well: our robot drives reliably and we are working with sensors to program traction control. Another segment of our build team has also been working on bumpers. We chose to program in C++ instead of LabView because our programmers and mentors have more experience working in a similar environment.
My dad and I recently finished building the trailer, so here are some observations and tips that would help with building the trailer.
First, hot gluing the pipes into the trailer does not work. Instead, we cut bigger rings of PVC and glued them to hold the pipes in place. The bottom ring prevents it from falling through the bottom layer of the trailer and the top ring prevents it from wobbling up and down. This design works well, but it requires the pipes to be put in the trailer before the bumpers are attached, because they can’t be put down through the top later.
Next, the design that holds the trailer tongue with three wood screws seemed flimsy because the trailer would be dragged around by it. I attached additional brackets around the pole so that it would not be broken off on accident. The wheels were supposed to be attached by a long bolt to a bracket on only one side, so I reinforced that by attaching a metal bracket on the other end. The image on the right shows both of these improvements.
Here I am with the finished product:
So we got both robots to move today!
But there is little time for rejoicing. We must now:
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
http://www.stioptronics.com/Map_to_STI.htm
I’ll actually be there this time, so I’ll see you guys there!
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.
FIRST announced the challenge for this year’s competition: Lunacy. They also released the 2009 FIRST Robotics Competition Manual and Related Documents.
Here is the competition video:
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.
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.
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.
-It could also just be a red herring….
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.