Top 5 List - Number 2

Number 2 on the list was a rookie team in 2008...


#2


Team 2337 - EngiNERDS I've never felt the pressure of being on a rookie team before, and I can imagine that trying to get a new team off the ground is a tough job. Heck, it's a tough job just to design, build and program a robot in 6 weeks, even when the team has been doing it for years.

So, when I saw Team 2337 roll out their rookie robot, I was stunned. It was a beautiful machine that used an elegant "booter" to kick the Track Ball over the Overpass. They traveled across the state and competed in the West Michigan Regional; I hope they make the trip again in 2009. I'm anxious to see what you guys come up with this year.

Good luck!

Top 5 List - Number 3

Time for #3 of my top 5 FIRST Robotics Competition teams/robots for 2008.



#3

A local (West Michigan) team comes in at number three. Team 141 - Wobot is from West Ottawa High School. This team really turned my head this year. Their chassis design and steering allowed them to maneuver incredibly well around the track. They could turn laps as fast or faster than most of the simple robots that focused only on running laps.

On top of an extremely quick robot, they built a very elegant shooting mechanism using surgical tubing. Their team was able to quickly grasp a Track Ball and secure it until they approached their Overpass. As they approached the Overpass they easily were able to hurdle the ball every time. They came up with a very impressive design, executed their plan and the drive team was able to control their machine easily. Excellent work Wobots!

Best of luck to your team in 2009!

Quick Reminder

This is a quick reminder for people that are new to FIRST and also to all the people that have had experience with FIRST. Please check out my website: FIRSTObjective.org. This site targets both the FIRST community and also those who do not know about FIRST (teachers, school administrators, government officials, etc).

FIRST Objective is trying hard to get more schools involved in FIRST, but it takes the help of people already involved in FIRST. We have many team promo videos on our site, but we need more! If you have videos that you feel promote your team or FIRST in any way, please link them in on FIRST Objective. The easiest way is if they are already on YouTube.

If you are not already involved in FIRST, then check out FIRST Objective to learn more about what we do and what FIRST is all about.

Top 5 List - Number 4

If you are a new reader, I am counting down my Top 5 list.
Read the earlier post for more details.

#4

Number 4 on the list is Team 71 - The Beast, from Hammond Indiana. Team 71 has always impressed me and they've always had a well engineered machine. This year their design was very innovative with a nice emphasis on Track Ball retrieval. From my perspective their team worked well together and couple that with an excellently designed machine, Team 71 was a powerful team in 2008.

Team 71, Good luck in 2009!

Roger's 2008 FRC Top Ten (wait... 1,2,3... ) Top Five List

For some reason I've always liked the end of the year top whatever lists. Sometimes its the top 100, other times its the top 10...

Well, just the other day I started thinking about making my own top 10 list. I wanted to create a list of FIRST Robotics Competition teams and/or robots that stuck out in my mind over the last year. PLEASE keep in mind that my list is based entirely on what I saw at either a regional or from an Internet stream. Here's what I saw in 2008. I watched some of the live feed from the mid-west regional. I attended the regional in Milwaukee and West Michigan and watched some of the stream on NASA TV of the Championship. I also attended the West Michigan Regional Invitational, which was an off-season event held in October. All in all, I only saw a very small fraction of the teams compete, and still, when I watched all these events I wasn't keeping a score card in preparation for this blog. This list is simply the teams that really REALLY stuck out in my mind this year.

So I started thinking back at the teams and robots that I really admired. I wanted to make a top ten list and I wrote down 5 teams immediately. I started trying to think of other teams to round out the list and really drew a blank. There were other teams that I could remember, but only because I've been familiar with them over the past couple of years. So with that in mind, here is my top 5 list of FRC teams for 2008.

#5

910 - Foley Freeze

From Bishop Foley Catholic High School in Madison Heights Michigan.

I was familiar with this team from the 2007 season and really didn't get to see their stuff until the West Michigan Regional Invitational. It did help that our team was partnered with 910 in the finals. As an alliance, we ended up with being runners-up, but their robot really impressed me. I liked their design, their team was confident about their capabilities and I respect that a lot.

I'm looking forward to seeing Foley Freeze in 2009. Good luck to your team!

kick off and poll results

The official kick off to the 2009 season is a week from today. At that point teams will start brainstorming their design and the build season starts. The clues that have been given will all make sense (probably not, but that's okay).

Speaking of clues, my last poll closed a short time ago. I asked if you would be trying to solve the clues that FIRST has given. I was amazed at the results, 80% said they would be trying to solve the clues and 20% said they would not. I like thinking about the clues, but I really thought more people would be ignoring them.

So, with that said, check out my new poll and let me know what you think. I know I have some readers (I have Google Analytics installed), so vote in a poll and leave a comment.

The top ten (err, five) list will come next. Check back tomorrow!

1 year old

Well, it was a year ago today that I started this blog. To commemorate the occasion I'm going to change some of the colors and give it a slightly new look. Maybe I'll do something like this every year.

A lot of things have happened this past year. Our FIRST Robotics Competition team had a good year. We didn't score a lot of wins, but we had a good time and did come away with a team spirit award. As a team we volunteered to help our community in many different ways. This helped our community and was a rewarding experience for our students too.

It was an exciting year for me as a parent to see both of my kids getting more involved in FIRST. Recently my daughter had to give a "business style" presentation in one of her classes and she did her presentation on FIRST. I thought that was awesome, since our school does not have a FIRST team; we work with a neighboring school. I hope that in 2009 both of my kids become even more involved.

Check back soon, I've been compiling a top ten list for 2008 (which will probably only be a top five list). I want to recognize the top teams / robot designs that I particularly liked for this year.

2009 FRC Game Clues

I've been wanting to come back to the game clues that we have been given for this year, and now I think is the time. If you remember the first clue was the picture of the Moonfish. There was a lot of speculation as to if the clue was embedded in the image file, and I am thinking probably not. I'm still sticking with my thought that "Moonfish" is the clue. Does that mean fishing? or does it have something to do with the Moon? Maybe we fish something out of a substance similar to Regolith .

The second clue:

Take your machine out of the shop on Colorado in Paramount;
stop by and get connected on Central in Phoenix;
drive by and make a pickup on Minnetonka in Minnetonka;
then head to the field on Evergreen in Dover.

This one has stumped me for some time now. It sounds like there may be a process that needs to be followed. After starting, stop by and get connected, drive by and make a pick up and then head to the field.

Minnetonka is also interesting. In Minnesota, near Minneapolis you'll find the town of Minnetonka. In Minnetonka you can find both Minnetonka Blvd and Minnetonka Dr. They also have Lake Minnetonka... An interesting note about Lake Minnetonka is that the central body of water is surrounded by smaller bays.

It's really quite funny how a lot of students involved in FIRST want "the water game" and any time a clue leads to water, they go crazy. I just want to throw in my $0.02 about the logistics of a water game. It would be an extreme amount of work to construct some kind of aquarium that would hold enough water to have even two 120 pound robots not to mention six. Also, think of the law suits that would follow if some high school gymnasium floor was flooded because a robot broke the wall. Underwater robots are very cool and have explored much of the oceans, but I don't think FIRST teams will be building them any time soon.

If my memory is correct, FIRST gave teams 3 clues last year. I'm hoping that maybe one more clue might make some of this make sense, but probably not.

1st Hardware Test Successful

This afternoon we completed our first test of the new hardware. We ran into a couple problems because we didn't start by following the instructions step by step. Last week we all knew of "things" that we had to do, and everyone started doing what they felt needed to be done. We would have saved ourselves some time had we just followed the directions.

The first thing we did was connect the Driver Station and we immediately updated it's firmware. We shouldn't have done that, but we got around it. At our last meeting we realized we were doing things out of order and tried to get back on track. Our goal was to complete the "bench top" test, but now we had upgraded the firmware in the Driver Station, and it didn't work when we connected it to the cRIO.

From FRC 2009 Hardware

We soon realized that we needed to upgrade the firmware in the cRIO so that it would be compatible with the updated Driver Station. After fiddling with the IP addresses of the cRIO (and getting our team number correct) we were able to download the new firmware to the cRIO.

From FRC 2009 Hardware

Shortly after the update we were able to power up the system and we were getting good signals from all components. We had 2 joysticks connected to the Driver Station and we were able to drive both CIM motors independently (as expected).

From FRC 2009 Hardware

In the end, we completed the "bench top" test with updated versions of the firmware.

I was hoping that by today we would have been able to connect wirelessly to the robot network, but I am happy that we at least were able to control the motors.

Unfortunately tomorrow is the end of school for the holidays and we will not be meeting again until kick-off. I feel good that we made progress, but I wanted more. :)

New clue & new hardware

Today started out with a new clue from the FRC Director. Follow this link if you're interested in reading. I'll probably post something about the clue after I've had a little time to think about it.

Today I spent time digging into the new hardware and programming tools for this season. Apparently we requested to get an early shipment of the controller and it arrived late last week. This past Tuesday we opened the box and played with all the neat gadgets that it delivered.

Today we actually started making progress on hooking up the cRIO and the Driver Station. The cRIO (Compact Reconfigurable I/O) is the brain of our robot this year. It packs a 400 MHz Power PC processor with an embedded FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip for managing I/O. Comparing this power to a standard computer really isn't fair; so don't think this sounds kinda wimpy, because it isn't. It's extremely more powerful than the microcontrollers we used last year and it will allow us to accomplish some very complicated and time-intensive tasks.

Tonight our programming and electrical team consisted of 3 students and 2 mentors. We all primarily focused on electrical tasks, since there really isn't a lot to program until we get the hardware running. We updated the firmware in the Driver Station and began hooking up the wireless networking that will allow the Driver Station to communicate with the robot and also with a laptop computer. We were very close to starting some initial networking tests when we had to pack it up for the night. For school related reasons we had to be out by 6pm.

Next Tuesday we will be digging back into it, and hopefully I'll have more to write about.

If you are a student or mentor interested in programming, electrical or any aspect of FIRST, and think I might be able to answer a question you might have, please leave me a comment. I'll do whatever I can to find you an answer.

It's a Red Herring

For a few days now I've been thinking about the clue that FIRST has given us. Look at my previous post for more info about the clue.

There are a couple very interesting things about this image. The first is that this fish is called a moonfish, and searching google images for this results in the very image that FIRST used as the clue. The second thing is that the image that FIRST gave as the clue is larger (in bytes, not pixels). Yes, the images are identical in dimensions, but the clue is a bit larger. Some people began to speculate that the clue was actually embedded in the image file (this would explain the size of the files being different). Some thought that the clue was embedded in the image using jphide, and required a passphrase to extract. This discussion went on for some time.

I ran STRINGS on the clue file and also on the original image found in google images. I found some interesting differences. Within the clue file, there was an XMP tag. The metadata appeared to be a long string of spaces... Nothing usefull.

Now back to that fish. The fish is also known as an Opah, which is also known to be the king of the Herrings. And look, it's red! It's the king of the red herrings! I'm not sure what it means, but I'm done trying to solve this one for now. Maybe there'll be something in the second clue that seems to make more sense. Till then, I'll be trying to understand the new hardware and programming libraries.

FIRST game clue #1

Today FIRST announced the first game clue for 2009. This is the clue if you don't want to visit the FIRST site:This is a fish... more specifically it is a Lampris Guttatus, sometimes called an Opah. Actually this fish goes by many names and the most interesting one is Moonfish.

If you go to google images and search for "moonfish", the first image you get is this exact image.

Call me gullible, but I think the clue here is the word moonfish. I don't know what it means yet, but if you have an idea, please post a comment!