Parade Floating on Air

FRC Team 3313 Mechatronics met officially for the first time on Thursday. The leadership on the team was definitely surprised by the amount of sophomores that came to the meeting! Rough estimate was about 20 people showed up. That's awesome!

Our main goal for the meeting was to get our parade float all ready. Which, thanks to all the help, we got done in record time. Bydlon and the sophomores started decorating the float with multi-color balloons which the girls on the team quickly shot down. We bought black, blue, and silver balloons to make it look nicer on the actual parade day. We also painted the back of a 2 point goal and attached that to the trailer so it is stable. Molly and Heidi helped teach everyone how to correctly splatter paint. We also made a platform for the robot out of some palettes and plywood. That was also splatter painted for effect. Bryce and Joe made some wheel wells for the robot so it won't roll around during the parade.

While all the trailer action was going on, Bryce, Alicia, CJ, and Joe took apart the prototype robot from last year. We need all the parts we can get for future prototyping plus, it was a good learning lesson for the rookies.

Up in the computer lab, Kacy worked on a potential future sponsor opportunity. Jade, Lacey, and Mitch worked on creating a list of information about our hub teams and all FRC teams in general. The Hub Team information will be especially nice as we start to get in contact with them.

It was a great first meeting!

Starting Fresh

The returning members of the team have been busy so far this school year!

We had our robot out at lunch 2 weeks ago to drum up interest at the high school. It was fun to shoot frisbees  by the lunch tables and drive it behind unsuspecting students. The interest in the team seemed really good! We even taped an advertisement to our robot as it rolled around. 

Then we had an informational meeting just for students last week. This also went really well. We went over a quick slide show that summarized FIRST, our team, and what is expected of students. We had about 9 new people show up which is pretty good for a team of our size. It was a good mix of grades as well. After the slide show, everyone moved down to the shop for a tour. Finally, the new team members were able to give our robot a test drive and shoot some frisbees. 

As the final preparation for the new year, we had a parent meeting last night. Bydlon, Kacy, and Bryce went over a slide show talking about the team, our schedule, and the costs of being on the team. Then parents asked questions and the meeting was over! The parents were all very excited and very thankful for getting a full year schedule (this has never happened before). Also, a few of the parents had younger students interested in being on the FTC team which would be GREAT! We are all so excited now.

First official meeting is Thursday after school and the Homecoming Parade is on Saturday!

FTC and FLL Expansion

This is going to be a long post. You've been warned.

But it's big FRC Team 3313 news so if you're interested, keep reading.

State Fair

This is an insanely late post (this event happened 18 days ago... OOPS!) but here's a quick recap!

Check out our YouTube video for more info.

Team 3313 Mechatronics attended the MN State Fair on Sunday, August 25. Jade, Kacy, Carson, Bydlon, Lacey, Tyler, and Bryce were present.

The main memory? The heat and humidity. Dew points were above 70 (tropical) and temps were in the high 90s. The team members who attended have never sweat so much in their lives!

The other main memory? One of our wheels literally snapped in half (watch the video up above). So The Blitz Team 2470 graciously let us use one of their wheels so we could keep competing.

Just getting the robot down to the State Fair was an experience. Lacey's dad drove the robot down to the west suburbs of the Cities and then Bydlon picked it up with his dad's truck.

The State Fair competition was super fun (even with the excessive heat). There were a bunch of mini games that each robot had to perform. Autonomous, Timed, Sequential, Tag, Parking, and Climbing were just a few of them. We also walked in a parade but it was too hot to really do much unfortunately.

We found time after one of our competitions to let a bunch of audience members drive the robot and shoot discs which was super fun (as always). The students from FRC 2220 who helped set up and run the competition were great. Shoutout to Sharon from the MN State Fair for organizing the whole thing.

Our robot and drivers (Tyler and Bryce) performed wonderfully! We ended up having the best one round score of any robot in the competition and we placed 3rd when you added up all the rounds together.

We exposed A TON of people to FIRST Robotics and had a blast. You can't ask for much more.