Zaaaaaa

The team met for the first time after a very tiring, very exciting day on Saturday. We worked on a number of different projects. Our busy schedule never stops.

Bydlon and Kacy worked on writing another email to West Central MN teams about the Robotapalooza. Robotapalooza will be on December 1. It will be a fun day filled with games, conversation, and camaraderie. We purposefully did not plan for a lot of workshops where people are directly talking to others. We really wanted a more laid back kind of day where teams from a similar region can just hang out with each other. So far, 4 teams have responded with a "yes". Perham, Morris, Wadena, and Moorhead. We are so excited to host these teams at our school!!

Bryce, Brandon, and Demian worked on making field walls for the Robotapalooza. We want to have half a field for teams to practice on and play around with. To do this, we need to build the walls out of plywood and 2x4's. We bought all the supplies necessary.

Carson worked on creating a Pizza Ranch poster. We will be hosting a Pizza Ranch tip night on Monday, December 3. 10% of all sales will be donated to our team. To promote the event all over our town, we will hang up posters at schools and small businesses.

Kadi and Miranda worked on writing the blog post about the Minne-Regional. It turned out great! Just scroll down to read it.

Miranda also worked on finding some carpet for us to use. Unfortunately, it was pretty expensive so we'll have to figure out another plan.

More updates to come after Thanksgiving!

PRESS THE BUTTON

Just a few of the team members came today but actually led to quite a bit being accomplished. It was a good day.

First of all, Murphy programming upgrades occurred today. Alicia mounted the green LED light we bought and wired it up. Allen and Dalton, green LED light installed, finished the vision processing programming. They have it so, after pressing a button, Murphy automatically centers itself on a basketball hoop. IT IS SO COOL! Pretty great work by those two. There are still a few kinks to work out but overall, it will be really helpful during matches to not worry about that. The other programming upgrade is that we added autonomous. Funny moment: someone suggested we should add it in, Allen goes "Give me a minute". Literally a minute later, we had autonomous. Incredible. AND IT WORKS! WOOO!

Kacy and Miranda got to work on our Public Relations workshop for the Minne-Regional on Saturday. We volunteered ourselves to host a workshop on dealing with the public. It is a big deal for our team to get our name out there among other FRC teams as a major player. Over the weekend, Kacy and Bydlon worked on a general outline for the workshop. Today, Kacy worked on turning the outline into a slide show. Miranda worked on a booklet to hand out to teams when they attend the workshop. Both of them worked really hard. Carson also contributed by finishing our coloring book idea from last year. Each team in attendance will receive a "Mechatronics Coloring Book" as well. Should be a fun half hour or so!! (That's the plan anyway).

Bryce worked on numerous projects. Dalton, Bydlon, and Bryce got the robot weighed at UPS. It's only 110 lbs! WOOO! After adding pneumatics, we were all a little concerned about it being overweight. Luckily, it's not. Bryce also worked on getting extraneous pieces off of Murphy and switching some stuff around so it is optimized.

Kacy fixed some of the broken or beat up pieces on Mechatron, our mascot. After going to Chicago, Massman, lunches, and many other public appearances, it can look a little worse for wear. Kacy and the others have done a great job of keeping it looking great.

The rest of the day was spent by Bryce and Alicia practicing picking up balls and shooting baskets.

Tomorrow is another full team meeting. Lots more to accomplish!

Practice Makes Better

The team met today without any plans really other than practicing driving. We brought Murphy and all of our driving equipment to the gym. Different team members took turns driving the robot around and shooting baskets. It was super fun. Kacy and Bydlon worked on our Minne-Regional workshop about public relations and websites. Solidworks gave our team 20 free copies. Brandon and Bryce downloaded it and started playing with designs. After driving for a while, the cheerleading squad walked through the gym. A few of them volunteered to come with to the Minne-Regional! To end the meeting, some team members used the 10 sided die to decide where to eat. Dairy Queen won.

Not exactly a super productive day but it was still really fun. Love this team.

Murphy 3.0

Some of the team members met today to work on a few different projects. You can see video of Murphy 3.0 here.

Bryce and the build team worked on upgrading Murphy for the 3rd and, most likely, final time. The upgrades came about after going to the Pack Expo and seeing designs we liked. It also came about because of the shooter wheel change we made at the Pack Expo. We changed the drive train again. This time we went SUPER SIMPLE. Just gear boxes chained very short to plaction wheels on the front. Omni wheels are in the back. That's it. The CIM motors were reduced to 3 (left wheel, right wheel, shooter wheel). The pneumatics were hooked up again. The programming was fixed so it all worked together. The conveyer was put back on a victor. Basically, we simplified everything and made it much cleaner.

Alicia, David, Carson, and others got stuff ready for the Bydlon Beard Off. David did an awesome job and made signs for each beard design. Carson got boxes for money. Alicia and David made a GREAT poster for the table we'll have set up at lunch.

Brandon worked on learning about AutoDesk. Bydlon emailed Solidworks to see if our team could get some copies.

The best part of the day was driving Murphy to the commons area and filming it. It drives SO NICE. Can't wait to use it the Minne-Regional on November 17!!

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!