Day 1 of St. Louis Regional- set up and practice

Whew, today was a long day! For three of our members, it started at the arena at 7 am. For the rest of us, 8 am was the beginning of what was going to be a very long day of testing, breaking, fixing, and practicing with the robot, as well as scouting out other teams and making friends. We met some really great people- in particular, the team from Bishop DuBorg, whose team number I am forgetting right now. Anyways, they really helped us fix the problems that we had with our minibot, going above and beyond the call of gracious professionalism. So, kudos to them! :)

Anyways, the whole day was filled with testing our robot on the practice field, and recognizing the issues we were having with the bot. One major issue was that the robot wasn't tracking the reflective tape line like it was supposed to, because the lighting in the arena was different than what we had calibrated it to originally. So we had to reprogram that. And of course, we had to get our robot inspected, and it took a while to pass inspection. But we did eventually, so that's all good. We also had to completely restructure and reprogram our mini bot. Let me try to put a picture in your mind of how much progress we made- this morning, we couldn't even get the bot to climb the pole. By 6:30 this evening, it was able to climb- and fast, too, within 8 seconds! Which is pretty awesome.
Here's a picture of our team this morning:

From right- Daniel, our programmer; Mike, our mascot/driver/builder/etc; Grace, our blogwriter/marketing/scouter/oddjob doer; and Sammiyah, our minibot gal/builder/electric stuff-er.

Yep, that's us! Not the whole team, of course. But a few of us. In the photo, we are outside the loading dock of the arena, waiting to bring stuff in to the pits to set up.

Tomorrow begins actual competition. From 9am into the afternoon we will be in scheduled matches with pre-assigned alliances. It's intense but so worth it :) So if you want to see something really awesome, come on out to Chaifetz arena! Here are some basic house rules, however:

-You must be wearing close-toed shoes.

-Long hair must be tied back.

-You must wear saftey goggles while in the pit- these are not necessary in the stands, though. We can provide you with saftey goggles.

-No smoking.

Our pit station is located right at the corner of the pit, so if you go down the steps by section 115 we are right there. We will be wearing grey shirts. Hope to see you!

Good luck to all the other teams! :)