Day 1

Yesterday I posted the game animation for this year, and I said that I'd be posting some details about kick off. Well, I didn't get around to posting anything last night, and today I was scheduled to take down the Christmas tree / decorations. Anyhow, Ill try to give a few details about kick off.

I'm not going to go into details about the game, maybe I'll do that later. Our team helped distribute the Kit Of Parts to teams that attended our kick off.

From FRC 2009 Kick Off

Teams getting their KOP.

From FRC 2009 Kick Off

After teams got their parts, I attended a very informational presentation on the new control system. Team 141 gave the presentation and I stayed for the portion regarding programming using Wind River and C/C++. A representative from National Instruments gave a presentation on LabVIEW, however I didn't take time to stay for that.

Our team used a spare room to do brainstorming for a couple hours right after the kick off presentation. We would have been better off reading ALL the rules before starting our brainstorming, nevertheless it was interesting to come up with ideas.

After our brainstorming session we went back to look at a mock up of the field.

From FRC 2009 Kick Off

We had a sheet of the plastic that will be used to cover the field and a mock up of the trailer. Some of our students took shots at trying to throw the ball in the trailer, and that is proving to be a tough shot to make, especially when it's moving.

Today, I hope all the team members took time to read the manual. Tomorrow we meet and continue our brainstorming and hopefully will come up with a drive-train design.