Scouting Ahead

At one of the team's first meetings of the year, we all came together and decided on season goals. The big question: What did we want to accomplish this year? Some answers included:

• Make it to the elimination rounds of our Regional Competition(s)
• Go to two Regionals (Lake Superior and 10K Lakes)
• Recruit more team members (Have at least 15 people on the team)
• Expand our community awareness
• Compete in various awards (Entrepreneurship, Website, etc.)

We have worked really hard for almost 5 months straight now to complete all of those goals. Unfortunately, we did not fund-raise enough money to attend both the Lake Superior and 10K Lakes Regionals. It costs $5000 to register for one and an additional $4000 to attend another. We did not want to miss out on the opportunity to scout and research however. So the team attended the Lake Superior Regional as spectators. 

Preparing For the Onslaught

The major theme of this past week was preparing for the Kick-Off event along with preparing ourselves and the robot room for the most awesome, crazy, stressful, rewarding 6 weeks of the school year (the build season).

On Wednesday, the team split up into sub teams. Everyone went to the media center and watched videos pertaining to their area (Publicity, Electrical, Mechanical, and Programming). The videos are Webinars from the MN FIRST Robotics Splash event. The event is put on by some of the more veteran teams in MN. Those teams presented extremely valuable information on all aspects of the FIRST experience and then posted the videos of their presentations on the MN FIRST website. Each of the sub-teams learned a lot and had some really good discussions. The collaboration within the sub teams was surprising (and awesome) since they had just formed. While that was going on, Jenna emailed all of the PMMC suppliers to try and get more funding.

Thursday and Friday were spent working on a bunch of different areas.

• The mechanical and electrical teams spent it working on disassembling the drive train and electrical board. We did not have any information on what this season's game was going to be so we wanted a fresh start. Also, we are going to make major changes to both systems. The electrical board is going to be completely redone. We ordered Victor motor controllers to replace our more unreliable Jaguar controllers.The Robot Room was also organized (for the umpteenth time) in preparation for Kick-Off.
• While that was going on, the programming team started working on taking apart the drive station so we can accommodate more joy sticks and switches. They also discussed ideas on how each person was going to work on the programming during the season.
• The publicity/public relations team worked on two big projects. They got the ball running on creating t-shirts. They went to Cowing Robards and presented our designs (THEY ARE GOING TO BE SO SWEET). We will know the final designs and order the shirts next week. When we get the final designs, they will be posted. Their other big project was organizing our trip down for the Kick-Off on Saturday. We had some travel arrangement snafus. Also, every team member had to bring paperwork so that is always a hassle to get together. The team did a great job adjusting on the fly.

KICK-OFF IS TOMORROW!!!! This is the equivalent to Christmas Eve for FIRST Robotics Teams.

2nd Annual Minne Mini-Regional

Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will, will go wrong.

That's a good description of what happened during the trip down to Prior Lake for the 2nd Annual Minne Mini-Regional. The mini-regional was a competition of 24 teams from around Minnesota. There were two main purposes. It was a fundraising event to buy a field for the state of minnesota but, more importantly, it was chance for rookie team members to get an idea of what a FIRST competition is all about.

The day started bright and early at 4:45am. We got the robot in the truck and loaded up the van. Bydlon, Chandler, and Bryce were the only people to stay awake the whole drive. Bydlon and Chandler were driving so that's good. Bydlon decided to take a tour of Prior Lake (i.e. he got lost) but eventually made it to the high school and unloaded the robot.

Going back to the Murphy's Law theme, here's a list of things that did not work or did not go well during the competition day:

• camera (first wouldn't connect, then didn't have one)
• batteries (no charge)
• wireless network was too busy
• no ethernet cable (got yelled at)
• no surical tubing (had to borrow)
• minibot would not deploy correctly
• no solder gun
• too tired
• one wheel had no power
• scissor lift leaning like the Tower of Pisa
• first major snowstorm

Let's just say a lot of lessons were learned and we made some good friends (thanks King Tec 2169!). The most stressful part was that part of 94 was closed so we had to stay in a hotel in the Cities. We found one by the Mall of America and stocked up on necessary supplies (or played video games in Bydlon's case). We drove home the next day with no surprises thankfully.

In all seriousness, it was a great bonding experience. The rookies learned a lot about competition. The team learned begging will get you free pizza. Most importantly, we learned that our next competition can't go any worse.

Roll Out!