Business is Booming

The past few days have already seen a good deal of activity in and around the 3397 Robolions lab (especially as compared to last year, when we spent altogether too much time brainstorming). Captain Grace, Henry, and I arrived from musical rehearsal to find the hallway filled with teammates enjoying breaktime!

Much progress has also been made. Over the weekend, Mr. Wurst opened up the woodshop and helped us get working on our mock arena by drilling metal poles and cutting boards. With the help of mentor Rowland, work on our prototype continues. Dan Land stands ready and waiting to program our drive train, whenever it gets built. The team is already considering names for our robot (a girl this year), such as Nefertiti, Asami, Quorra II, and Shuttleworth (after Leanna Shuttleworth, the youngest British woman to climb Mount Everest)*. And our soda sales are booming!

*Also Fluttershy. Definitely an option.

Week 1 Update

Whew! Week one is done already! Can you believe it? This year's game is proving to be quite a challenge. Here are a few things we have accomplished this week:

-Basic strategy determined. We will be focusing on building a robot that can climb and deposit frisbees at the the top of the scoring pyramid, and that can then stay there until the end of the match, resulting in an extra 30 points. This strategy is very risky because if done correctly it will score us major points, but if it doesn't work, there is no other way for us to score, rendering our bot useless.

-Set up the electronics board. This year we're going with a plastic Lexan board rather than a plywood one. This makes the robot look more streamlined and sleek, and not as haphazard as in the past.

-CAD designs for the chassis. Our team CAD-er has almost completely CADed the basic chassis design. We're going with an unconventional design this year- no boxy rectangles for us!

-Programming progress. Our team programmer, Dan, has been training his apprentice, Josh and right now they are just working on testing connections and downloading the code onto the bridge. They're about to try connecting wirelessly.

-Shelves have been built. This year for competition we have two pit designers, Marquise and Addy. They have designed a fold-able shelf that has pegboard on the back so we can hang tools. The small shelf will display trophies and team pictures, and will have a TV set up running either video or picture slideshows. It's painted black and gold with paw prints- go lions!!

-Arm Design ideas. Though we have not begun prototyping yet, we have designs sketched up for claws that can lift the frisbees and clamp onto them. We also have begun designs for the climbing mechanism. More on that later.

We're working hard every day. Soon I'll write a post introducing all of our team members for this year. Peace out!

Captain Grace

Prototype Brainstorming

FIRST things first. (ba-dum-tish!) The FRC game this year, Ultimate Ascent, is similar in several ways to last year's Rebound Rumble, but trickily different in others. As in Rebound Rumble, a 15-second autonomous period, in which robots act purely on their programming and not at the direction of human drivers, starts the match. Robots score points by propelling frisbees (not basketballs) into 1-point, 2-point, or 3-point slots, each of which are respectively higher and harder to reach. Ultimate Ascent's title comes into play in the endgame, wherein robots are challenged to climb a tower with three rungs and remain hanging there long enough to score points.

On Kickoff Day, also known as "FIRSTmas" by Walter, the team elected to try a different strategy than we normally do. Instead of trying to build a jack-of-all-trades robot, we decided to specialize on the endgame and design and build a climbing robot.

Today, Walter and Mike brought four prototype concepts before the team to vote on. The choices included: a "side hook" plan, in which the robot grasps the rung of the tower and hoists itself up; a "corner hook" plan, in which the robot would grab onto the corner of the tower and climb up diagonally; a "tow truck" plan, in which the robot would pull itself up with a winch; and an "inchworm" plan, in which an extremely complex robot would yank itself up the tower, flipping over repeatedly in an inchworm-like movement.

With each team member voting for a plan A and B, we ultimately elected to build prototypes for both the "side hook" and "corner hook" plans, and to decide from there which to utilize in our final robot.

Day 1 of Design

Just some pictures from our first day of design:

 Paul modeling the game piece this year- Frisbees!

 Addy doing some research on the game rules

Discussing strategy

FRC Kick Off 2013

Happy New Year everybody!!!

Here we are, at the St. Louis Science Center, anticipating what is sure to be another fantastically suspenseful FRC  Kickoff! Everybody's just milling around and chatting now, but at 9:30, the fun will begin- the countdown to the release of the 2013 game.

There have been many hints dropped on Bill's Blog about what the game will be this year, but as usual, no one has been able to make much sense of them. I'm sure it'll all make sense when they announce the game, however- the GDC is pretty clever like that....

I'll be updating periodically, and as soon as the game video is released (and the website accessible- it's usually bogged down by traffic!) we'll hyperlink it up at the top as per usual.

Peace out!
Captain Grace 

Andrew's Triumphant (Partial) Return

Greetings! It is I, Andrew White, dusting off the Fourth Law of Robotics blog to announce that I am, in fact, currently attending a meeting of FRC Team 3397! Yes -- commence your rejoicing, for I HAVE RETURNED!

...Of course, this likely won't last, for sometime soon rehearsals for our spring musical will start, at which point team members Captain Grace, programmer Henry, and myself shall again depart. So enjoy my presence while you can. :)

Thrown Down

As you may have learned from the previous post, the RoboLions attended the Cow Town Throw Down in Kansas City last weekend.

The competition was difficult. Some of the best teams in the Midwest were present, with robots that could rival those of NASA's level (minus the million-dollar budget). Our team wasn't exactly as prepared as we could have been (we were making major changes to the robot the day before competition- and did not test those changes.) Needless to say, we ran into a lot of issues during competition, and had to repair our robot multiple times. We finished 42 out of 45 teams, However, we did win our last match, which was exciting- ending the competition on a positive note.

All of the challenges we ran into definitely taught us some lessons about what it means to be prepared. We also learned more about the importance of team dynamics, and communication. But we enjoyed the competition nonetheless, especially cheering on our friends teams 1985 (the RoboHawks) and 1094 (The Channel Cats) as they went through the finals. 1094's alliance ultimately won, beating out reigning champ team 16 (Bomb Squad).

Enjoy these pictures from the competition, they will soon be up on the Facebook page!