FIRST in Michigan

Today, FIRST made the announcement regarding the new structure of FIRST events in Michigan for the 2009 season. In this press release FIRST details how Michigan teams will compete in FIRST Robotics Competition in 2009.

In an effort to reduce costs and increase competitions, FIRST has broken up the state into 16 districts. Teams will then be able to compete in any number of the 7 different district events (I assume this is like a smaller regional). This should give teams the opportunity to compete in 2 district events whereas they may only have been able to compete in 1 regional event last year. The new structure also allows Michigan teams to ship robots between district events at a reduced rate. The teams that do well in district events will then compete in the state championship event and then can qualify for the world championship in Atlanta. 18 teams will be selected from the Michigan State Championship to go to Atlanta (equaling the number of teams sent from the 3 regionals in 2008).

The good -

It should be a lot more reasonable to compete in FIRST for Michigan teams. The district events will be closer to home and should reduce travel and shipping costs. Since Michigan is surrounded by water, it can make getting to an event a little more difficult (and expensive).

Since there will be more events in Michigan, it may make it possible for more administrators and government officials to attend, thus possibly encouraging more teams to get started.

The bad -

The regionals in Michigan (as we once knew them) may no longer be the pinnacle of regional events. All three regionals used to be the toughest in the world, and now that is being diced up and turned into smaller events that may or may not compare to a Michigan Regional.

The ugly -

Someone needs to find 4 more places in Michigan to hold district events. This may mean holding these events in a schools gyms. It may get tricky to find schools willing to turn their campuses into event venues during the dead of winter, and typically during exams and basketball season.


Whatever happens, it sure will be interesting. In these tough economic times, at least FIRST is trying to help out.

New Video

I think in my last post I mentioned that I had started working on a promo video for our FIRST Robotics team. I was hoping that my daughter would take over and finish it for me, however she didn't want to finish what I had started on our PC, but she thought she'd try to work on it on her Mac. As it turned out, the software that I was using on our PC lacked a lot to be desired and I downloaded a trial version of a pro package and it worked quite nicely.

As it stands now, she may or may not work on the video, I don't know. Nevertheless I spent a lot of yesterday working on it and I've posted the finished product on my YouTube site.

http://www.youtube.com/rogerlsmith

Check it out if you have about 3 minutes; I'm quite happy with the outcome.

Mid-summer update

So, just when I make the claim that I'm going to try hard to post something every day, I slip for a few days. But it's not because I haven't been doing anything FIRST related.

Sunday afternoon our FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) team held a fund raiser during a local car show, and I guess we did quite well. Fund raising is a huge part of a successful FIRST team, and doing it in the off-season is a wise use of time. During the school year and especially during build season, time is very hard to come by.

I have a few of my own FIRST projects that I've been working on too. The first of which is programming our VEX robot to follow a line. This has been a bit of a tricky problem and also the sensors are a bit finicky. When all the bugs are worked out of the program, I'm going to make a video and post it to YouTube. I'll post more about that here when the time comes.

Speaking of videos for YouTube, I'm working on a FIRST promo video for our FRC team. At some point I'll probably pass off ownership to my daughter, whom can do fantastic work with a video editor. Nevertheless, the concept for this video has been in my mind for months, and it hadn't taken off. Hopefully now that I've begun work on it, it will get finished by more talented hands.

Anyhow, it's mid-summer and FIRST news is slim these days. When I learn of cool stuff, I'll post it here.

I got nothing

I'm really trying hard to be devoted to writing something every day on this blog. I've had all day and I just can't think of anything new to write about.

This afternoon I watched IRI (Indiana Robotics Invitational) on NASA TV, and was very inspired by the last matches. At that time I figured I'd write some great analysis or match review, but now it seems a little late for any FIRST enthusiasts that may read this, and maybe a little too in depth for folks that are new to FIRST. For those wondering, IRI is an off-season robotics invitational that is played using the same game that was used this year (FIRST Overdrive). It is the largest off-season event held anywhere in the world (as far as I know). I wrote a piece about IRI a week or two ago; if you are interested you should be able to find it in the archives.

I guess I'll stick in a plug for my website. Whether you are new to FIRST or not, please check out my website. It serves 2 purposes; it is a community for FIRST enthusiasts to gather, share stories, videos and photos, and it is also a tool to help schools, sponsors and government officials to better understand FIRST. Please check it out and join if you feel I am doing a good job. You'll never get spam or anything unwanted, except an occasional newsletter. I am in the process of planning some major modifications, as it hasn't had a "face-lift" in several months.

Check out: http://www.firstobjective.org

Thank you.

FIRST teams travel to jolly old England

This weekend there are a few FIRST Robotics teams that are working with FIRST UK to conduct robotics demonstrations at the Farnborough International Air Show.

2008 Philadelphia Regional winner Miss Daisy (team 341), NASA Knights (team 122), and the 2008 World Champion Thunderchickens (team 217) are all in Hampshire UK at the airshow helping spark interest in FIRST Robotics Competitions around the world. The air show is July 14 - 20, and there will robotics demonstrations through the weekend.

Unfortunately for the chaps in England, they'll not get to see the Thunderchikens primary competition robot, they'll be seeing it's twin instead. Many competitive teams build 2 robots, one that is shipped at the ship date, and the "twin" is used for practice. The Thunderchikens primary robot will be battling at IRI (Indiana Robotics Invitational) this weekend.

FIRST team helping go to the moon

It's been almost a year since Google announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. If you are not familiar with this competition, it is a new race to the moon.

The original Ansari X Prize was won in 2004 by Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites. They launched Space Ship One into space above the Earth's atmosphere and completed the same mission again just a few days later.

The new Google Lunar X Prize is a race to the moon. Google will award 20 million dollars to any team (not a country) that can soft-land a robot on the moon and I think the robot lander has to travel 100 meters, or something like that. There are bonus bucks for finding water ice or photographing any space junk we may have left there 40 years ago.

Anyhow, the exciting news is that FIRST Robotics Competition Team 694 StuyPulse, from Stuyvesant High School in New York has joined forces with FREDNET in an attempt to win the Google Lunar X Prize. It is still unclear their exact role, but nevertheless this is very exciting news.

Just imagine, high-school students working on a robot that will go to the moon... The doors that FIRST can open are limitless. If this kind of activity isn't enough to get you to hooked on FIRST, then I don't know what will.

FIRST lands in New Zealand

FIRST has set foot in New Zealand in preparation for that county's inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition regional event. FIRST has kicked off a series of boot-camps using the standard VEX platform to give the kiwi kids a taste of competitive robotics.

NASA engineer Mark Leon and instructor Nancy McIntyre are featured in this video as they describe the concepts behind FIRST and what the kids will be doing during their boot-camps and how they'll proceed into the FIRST Robotics Competition in the coming months.

It is great to see FIRST expanding into other countries, at the same time it frustrates me to hear about apathetic and lazy teachers and administrators right here in my own town.

Wake up people, it's time for your school to start a FIRST team.

TSRIF - Technical Series of Radically Intense Fights

Did you ever sit around as a kid and make up games? I know I did. And what I want to know is where has everyone’s creativity gone? Kids make up games all the time, while we adults seem content with the same old thing, over and over again…

So here’s an idea. Imagine, if you can, a new sport. I'll call it "TSRIF" (Technical Series of Radically Intense Fights). This would be a high school sport where lots of students and parents show up to watch the game. Sometimes the band plays and occasionally there's even cheerleaders. The events would always be loud, action packed, fast moving, with tons of team pride and spirit. Sound interesting?

It's a tough sport though; you'd need to be very fit and strong to be a good competitor. Physical fitness and a sharp mind are essential, since the crux of this sport is adaptability. Over the long haul, your team needs to be able to adapt to a never ending series of changes...

Okay, take your classic sports, football, basketball, soccer, baseball, etc... Most everybody loves one of these sports, maybe more. Professionals have studied strategies and plays for playing these games to try to be better than their opponent. Plays have been memorized by the teams; even the spectators know and understand how each team is trying to win by their movements.

Imagine if you threw all of the predictability away. Imagine my new game “TSRIF “as something that would rarely be predictable. Devising strategies and game plans would be difficult, because that predictability would be gone. Imagine if every year “TSRIF” was played a different way.... Imagine if you had only 6 weeks to prepare your team to compete in this new and ever changing sport. It’d be crunch time!

So, in my game “TSRIF", a devious group of people would sit in a dimly lit room somewhere, during the months of summer and invent a new sport. They would come up with all the rules, penalties, ways to score points, bonuses, every thing. Absolutely nobody would know any of these details until the beginning of January, where there would be a huge conference for all the teams to hear the details and rules of this year’s game. At that point every team from every school would start to figure out how they are going to play the game, their own strategies for scoring and defense.

Would their team players need to be strong for lifting, fast for racing, or accurate for throwing? Maybe they’d need all of the above in some unexpected combination. Strategies would come from invention rather than memorization.

Well, if I have piqued your curiosity, read on, because there is just such a sport in some schools right now.

I call it an academic sport, and there is one major component that I have not mentioned yet. It involves physics, science, technology, electronics and a lot of brain power…

So, once the group of devious game designers invents the new sport for the year, and the conference to announce the sport has taken place. All of the teams begin brainstorming rather than working out and pumping iron, because they will not be the players on the field, but they must design and build a robot will take their place on the field. This is known as FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST is an acronym – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. FIRST teams are popping up all over the country and all over the world. FIRST is a non-profit organization that aims to help kids become interested in science and technology by honoring their achievements in the same way that our culture honors sports heroes and movie stars.

Every year a FIRST team has to adapt to a new game, with new rules. They must design and build a new robot. Teams do not use robots from previous years, and they really couldn’t because the way the game is played is radically different from year to year.

To make it even more fun for the spectators and more difficult for the team, every game has an autonomous period where the on-board computer is the only thing controlling the robot while it attempts to score points and avoid penalties.

If you’d like to learn more about FIRST Robotics Competitions, visit my website http://www.firstobjective.org which contains lots of videos, or the official FIRST website at http://www.usfirst.org

The New cRIO

I am really excited about the 2009 FRC season and the changes being made by FIRST. Since I've been interested in getting a head start on next seasons programming and electrical, I am going to attempt to write a series of posts (probably not in a row) on some of the basics and particulars of the new CompactRIO (cRIO) control system from National Instruments (NI). CompactRIO is a low cost, high performance programmable automation controller and acquisition system powered by NI's Reconfigurable I/O (RIO) technology.

One of the most needed upgrades to the FIRST controller hardware, is the ability to bypass the ancient serial joystick port. The new cRIO Driver Station will have USB ports for joysticks. Also, there will be no more slow downloads to the controller as the new cRIO is wireless and will connect to an 802.11 wireless network. This should also allow for robot-to-robot communication.

Now let's look at the hardware inside the cRIO. The new processor will be at least 10 times faster (the old 40Mhz 8-bit will now be 400Mhz 32-bit) which will greatly improve computations related to floating point math and allow for more accurate readings from quadrature encoders and allow for optical character recognition.

Programming will be accomplished using either C/C++ or NI's LabVIEW. The C/C++ IDE will be Eclipse using the WindRiver Workbench and possibly easyC and RobotC. WPILib will be supported and it looks like it will be open source. It should be supported using either C/C++ or LabVIEW.

I still haven't found a lot of details, but I'm going to continue digging. Check back often and if you have additional information regarding the new control system, please post a comment.

Team Leadership

Today I read this article that I found on mlive.com from the Grand Rapids Press.

Apparently the FIRST team at Grandville High School (RoboDawgs, Team #288) in Grandville Michigan is having an issue with leadership of their team. The article makes the claim that certain people feel the need to have Team 288 directed by administrators, their team boosters and corporate sponsors. Apparently a group of people feel that because the RoboDawgs didn't have a winning season, they need to change their leadership...

This is interesting to me since my team (904) worked closely all of this season with the Grandville team. The RoboDawgs are such a great group of people and the parents, mentors and students were all incredibly helpful to our team. They worked great together and I was very thankful that they allowed us to work with them and test our machine at their facility.

It is simply astounding to me to think that someone wants to change their leadership simply based on their performance this year. That is NOT what FIRST is about. It's NOT about winning and it’s NOT even about building robots... It is about giving students the opportunity to solve unique and interesting problems in a short amount of time while keeping within a limited budget. These are experiences that professional engineers face every day.

The companies that sponsor FIRST teams do NOT do it because they want "air time" with their logo in people's faces while their robot is winning. They do it because they value our young people, and hope that given the right circumstances, they'll go to college to study engineering, science and technology and be able to return to the community to help these companies grow.

The article also claims that Grandville's Robotics Team Booster Organization was formed to help the team through tough times. Running a FIRST robotics team is a lot like running a business. There is ALWAYS money problems and lack of adults that provide the guidance every team needs. I find it appalling that the RoboDawgs are chasing away a good group of caring adults that have provided leadership to their team for several years. I sincerely hope they can work through their differences and return as a whole cohesive team for 2009.

Fourth of July Fund Raising

Wednesday July 2, 2008 we had some strong storms pass through our area which knocked out the power to most of the region. We were without power for almost 2 full days, but did get it back just before lunch-time on Friday the Fourth.

Our FIRST team usually helps out at a carnival style event that we use as a fund raiser. Students from the team help set up, run and take down those large inflatable bouncy things that kids like to jump on and twist their ankles. It's typically a very safe time; every once in a while someone gets an owwie, but after a minute or two they're usually back at it.

The Fourth of July fund raiser is usually a very long and hot day, as it was again this year. By the end of the day when all the equipment needs to be packed up, everyone is pretty tired.

We'll be doing something similar in a few weeks, however this will be a volunteer event that our team will be doing for the community.

If you're team does anything like this, leave me a comment. Thanks!