FIRST 360: The Revolution

Going to World Championships!

2011-03-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Team 360 is sending a travel team of 16 students to St. Louis at the end of April.

Congratulations, everyone! Here are some celebratory pictures.

The Chairman's Award

2011-03-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a successful event! At the Seattle Cascade Regional, Team 360 made it to the semi-finals AND won Chairman's! A congratulations is in order to the students – We won the Chairman’s award!!!!

About the Chairman’s Award

The FIRST Robotics Competition is about much more than the mechanics of building a robot or winning a competitive event. It is about the partnership among people who are part of the FIRST community and the impact on those who participate in FIRST programs with a united goal of achieving FIRST’s mission. The FIRST mission is to change the way young people regard science and technology and to inspire an appreciation for the real-life rewards and career opportunities in these fields.

The Chairman’s Award was created to keep the focus of the FIRST Robotics Competition on our ultimate goal to transform the culture in ways that will inspire greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology, as well as encourage more of today’s youth to become scientists, engineers, and technologists.

The Chairman’s Award represents the spirit of FIRST. It honors the team that, in the judges’ estimation, best represents a model for other teams to emulate, and which embodies the goals and purpose of FIRST. It remains FIRST’s most prestigious award. FIRST presents a Regional Chairman’s Award at each local competition. Only the winners of the these Chairman’s Awards will be eligible to compete for the Chairman’s Award presented at the FIRST Championship.

So in light of qualifying for World Championship, we are going to have an emergency meeting on Monday, March 21, at 5:30pm at Bellarmine. All students and parents are required to attend. If this is impossible for whatever reason, please talk to Eric Stokely (360-970-3034 or estokely@gmail.com) before the meeting.

The World Championship will take place in St. Louis, April 27-30^th.

This being said, I know for a fact that some students have not given me a parent email. Students, it is your responsibility to get yourself and a parent there.

Students, one more message for you: please go ALL OUT on Tuesday at school. Robotics gear, hair, and everything you can think of to celebrate. This is one day that the school lets us be a little crazy (hair-cough) because we won. Let’s make it the best it can be!

Parents, I have one other request especially for you. Please, please, DO NOT start checking on prices for plane tickets. This is exactly what drives them up! Let the team handle getting the tickets. Two years ago when we won Chairman’s, the tickets started off at a reasonable price, but by the time we were finally able to order them, we were paying over $700 a ticket! Please don’t let this happen again!

At our emergency meeting, we will discuss our options as far as going to the World Championship. Due to low funds, this year it will be a big challenge for us to go. Any and all support is welcome and greatly appreciated! Feel free to contact me with any questions.

See you on Monday!

Marissa Birmingham

General Manager

FIRST Team 360 – The Revolution

mabirmingham@cocmast.net

Regional Competitions

2011-03-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

Well, the robot has been Bagged and Tagged! Currently we are in prep-mode for competition. This includes working on minibot designs as well as a heap of paperwork per student. Please fill out each form carefully and return to Marissa as soon as possible.

What is all the paperwork for? A summary of events/letter from Stokely accompanied the paperwork, but I'll include the major info in case that page got misplaced.

Everything you need to know, quickly and concisely.

Seattle: March 17, 18, and 19 at the Qwest Event Center

Free Admission, pay for parking
March 17: 20-person crew, private transportation
March 18: Larger group, 14-seat minibus leaving Bellarmine at 8am sharp. Students can sign up for rides in the lab. Bus returns approximately 7-7:30pm; there will be a scouting meeting at Bellarmine at that time that everyone is encouraged to attend.
March 19: All members expected to attend. 14-seat bus leaving Bellarmine at 8, returning between 6 and 7:30pm. Missing Saturday would cause a student's spot to be dropped from our Portland trip unless previously excused by Stokely.
Parents and supporters are encouraged to attend the event. Friday and Saturday are the main event days.

Portland: March 23-26 at the Rose Garden in Portland, OR
Chartered bus to leave Bellarmine at approximately 4pm on Wednesday. (Be there and ready to go by 3:45.)
Pack clothes for 3 days and don't forget team shirts! Pack light.
Traditionally, the team goes to Todai, a restaurant nearby. Make sure to bring enough money for food each day. We will be returning to Bellarmine around 8-9:30 Saturday night.

St. Louis: World Championship at the end of April.
If we qualify for St. Louis there will be an emergency meeting of parents and students the following Monday. Currently we do not have the funds necessary to attend World, so if we qualify we will need to pull things together fast.
The whole team will not be able to attend, only the essential 12-15 students.

Costs

Clothing

Each team member is required to purchase one $20 polo shirt. Anyone on Pit or Drive team also needs a $10 apron (can use previous year's). There were also sweatshirts and fan t-shirts available, and each student is aware how much they owe the team. Any questions regarding clothing may be directed to Marissa.

Team-issued safety glasses: if lost, the student must replace them!

Portland

Hotel rooms and bus fare for the entire trip is totaling $185 per person. This includes breakfast if up early enough. Rooms have been assigned; there is no room for change or staying with friends or family. If requesting a rollaway, the cost is $15 extra PER night ($45 total). This must be paid for in advance.
Plan on spending $50-75 on food for the weekend.

Any questions can be directed to Stokely or leadership.
Thanks!

Everything in a Nutshell

2011-02-10T16:28:00.000-08:00

Well, time is going by fast as we work Week 5. We've got many things going on:

Mechanical

Inside of tube grabber/claw: using three PVC tubes, a single pneumatic moves two of the PVC tubes to open and close in order to grab logo pieces from the inside. The grabber is mounted to a four foot long arm that slides up and down on the elevator.

Elevator: Twin slider design with two chains for lift, going to be tested for jamming soon.
Minibots: Currently, our fastest design uses motors with the transmissions removed for direct drive of an axle with surgical tubing for traction on the pole. Time = 1.7 seconds

Electrical

We're wiring up our final electrical board, which will fit on an 15x18 inch area; it has two flaps that go up and bend inwards to make the appearance of a box. I'll post pictures when it's finished.

Programming

As far as programming goes, our programmer is working on a program that will change the PID during drive time, either adding or subtracting from the values depending on button presses, to allow us to test out PID on the fly. We got the CAN bus working and the Jags are working in sync, although we only have 4 black Jags and are using 3 brown Jags at the moment.

Chairman's

With Chairman's we've made incredible progress. Today was a team read day, and we've been hovering just over or just under our 10,000 character max for the last few days. With less than a week to complete the paper, we're right on schedule. We will be working on the presentation part after the essay is submitted.

T-shirts

Our team is getting ready to order clothing for the year, so team members, make sure you turn your order forms in soon! For non team-members, we have two varieties of fan t-shirts this year. Please pick up an order form from the lab if you're interested. We are using sales of t-shirts as a fundraiser as well. Each shirt is $20.

Well, there's everything in a nutshell! Thanks for reading!

Programming

2011-02-03T15:35:00.000-08:00

This year we plan to use Java to program our robot. We will also be learning C++ and Labview to help other teams.

Rather than using the classmate laptop for our control station, we have an Asus EeePc primarily because of superior battery life and keyboard size.

Currently we have created a program that helps prevent our robot from turning too fast and tipping over. PID control code was created and tested but does not yet work.

We will be switching from Victors to Jaguars soon, so code will need to be tweaked, but that will be minor. Firmware flashing for jags and CAN stuff will need to be looked into.

Chairman's Progress

2011-02-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

Over the past few weeks, a subgroup has been brainstorming and outlining what we wish to cover for our Chairman's submission. This has led us to ponder questions found below. It would be wonderful to get the team's thoughts on these questions for the subgroup to use in their writing. Please comment or (team members) email your thoughts. Thank you!

How does FIRST Impact students?

How does FIRST impact the school?

How does FIRST impact the engineers?

How does FIRST impact the community?

Why should 360 be a role model for other teams?

How is 360 a role model for other teams?

How has the team communicated its excitement and impact in the school?

How has the team communicated its excitement and impact in the community?

How has the team communicated its excitement and impact in the state/nation?

How does 360 spread the FIRST message?

What partnerships does team 360 have:

Student to sponsors?

Student to school?

Student to mentors?

Students to parents?

Student to community? /Team to community?

4 Uninterrupted days of Botics!

2011-01-28T11:47:00.000-08:00

With semester break now, we have four straight days of free time to build robots! And we plan on putting it to good use. On mechanical, we have made a lot of progress. We now have our new wheel-mounts on the robot frame, placing the robot about 1/8 of an inch off the ground. For the minibot delivery system, we plan on using a pneumatically powered slider to shoot the minibot onto the ten foot pole.

Sadly, the minibot itself has proven very difficult. We have been tinkering with the built-in transmissions on the motors, trying to eliminate some of the down gearing to get them faster, but the loss in torque currently makes it so that the minibot can't climb the pole anymore. We hope to fix that by reducing weight (maybe using magnets?) but we my just have to return to the original gear ratios.

We are also experimenting with eliminating the transmission in its entirety on the minibots, and reducing torque by not using wheels, but instead axles wrapped in surgical tubing. If this works, it could produce a very quick climb.

Other than building our robots, we've also been spending a lot of time lately at Stewart Middle School either helping to build the field or helping other teams with coding. More on that later from Tosh.

End of Week 2

2011-01-22T16:47:00.001-08:00

Next week we all have finals, so no one will be working on the robot until Wednesday afternoon. That being said, a small group of us managed to come in today and finish up some stuff before we have to take a break. We now have a drive train set up with encoders so that our programmers can get to work on programming some PID. We also finished up our prototype grabber, which works great, but is far too long (30+ inches). At the moment we have one pneumatic that performs two functions on the grabber, so we're going to replace that with two pneumatics, which should decrease the stroke lengths/pneumatics lengths.

One of our minibots went up the tower in under 10 seconds, with actual speeds being between ~5 and ~7 seconds, counting a little deployment time. The actual deployment mechanism will change that, but I have confidence that we should make it up the tower in under 10 seconds. At the moment, we're unsure about how to get the minibot down (we aren't using the NXT). We also thought a little more about the elevator, and then decided to leave it for Wednesday.

Where We Are Now

2011-01-20T18:38:00.000-08:00

So, here's the state of the robot at the moment, AFAIK; we're using pneumatics to power a grabber that applies pressure to the inside of intertubes to pick them up. We're going to use some sort of elevator, possibly something that telescopes up, which might be pneumatically powered or run with a couple of window motors. This is all balanced on top of a 6 wheel drive train with 2 sticky middle wheels, and 4 outer omni wheels.

Electrical Stuff

2011-01-19T17:10:00.000-08:00

At this point, we have a small electrical board so that the programmers can get to work. Today I soldered the new router to the dc-dc adapter and set that up, so we're now legally able to connect to the robot as is. Now I just need to replace the Victors with Jags and wire up some solenoids and this board will be good to go.

FTC State Championship

2011-01-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

Our FTC Team 3860 competed yesterday in the Washington State FTC Championship. When it came time for alliance selection, we were seeded third and became the captain of the third alliance. We selected teams 245 and 4054, and although we didn't make it to the finals, we are very proud of how well we did.

BPSEP also had a huge number of volunteers staffing the event, with both students and mentors doing things such as field reset, field tech assistance, queuing, filming, reffing, and scorekeeping. Our alumni were also volunteering, including field tech management, AV support (courtesy of A Plus LLC) and announcing.

We now transition back from FTC to FRC, with a bonus Monday free of school, and full of prototyping, testing, and brainstorming.

Welcome!

2011-01-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Bellarmine Prep Student Engineering Program's new blog!

Here you can find regular updates of what FIRST Team 360 is up to. To learn more about us, visit our website, http://bpsep.com/

Exactly one week ago, Team 360 ventured over to Auburn High School for the kickoff of this year's FRC game. The game this year certainly surprised many with the new addition of the minibot. To learn more about the game, visit FIRST's website, http://usfirst.org/. At the event, our team gathered for a group picture (see above).

WEEK 1

Ever since kickoff, we have been busily brainstorming and strategizing. So far, we are toying around with many ideas for the "host bot" and its manipulation of the game pieces. We have three different models of minibot design, and have tested two of them, with great success.

As a side note, BPSEP also has an FTC team going to state next week, team 3860. Most if not all members of the FRC team, as well as FTC team 360, will also be up at Sammamish High School in Bellevue bright and early to set up and volunteer at the event.

And now we head into Week 2 with a three-day weekend on our side. Keep checking in for more updates!