Exciting News

Today, a small group consisting of mentors from FRC Team 904 (myself included) and Team 2771, including a FIRST in Michigan representative met with Principals from 2 of the 3 high-schools in the Forest Hills Public School district. We explained that students from Forest Hills were already working with Team 904's FIRST Robotics Competition team and that we would like to see Forest Hills step up to the plate and help us get their own team started. After hearing us explain all the terrific benefits to students, they were in agreement and gave us the nod to recruit and put together our own team for the 2010 season.

We'll begin to hold recruiting meetings to see if we can drum up student interest so that the team can start to take shape. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out over the coming weeks and I hope to begin sharing them as we proceed.

If this team becomes a reality, it will have been born on Friday the 13th of November, 2009.

FRC Team 904 Promo Video 2009

I created this FIRST promo video, featuring Team 904. Enjoy!

No Posts

Sorry to any faithful readers for the lack of posts. Twittering has been an interesting diversion for the past few months. Maybe blogging will get more "front-burner" time soon.

Good Feeling

Sorry about the unannounced hiatus in my blog, I just really needed a little time to re-prioritize my activities. This will be a short post.

I just took a little glance through some pictures on facebook that some members of our team took on their trip to the FIRST Championship in Atlanta. I was so incredibly happy to see that members of our team were able to meet Dean Kamen and Woody Flowers; there were pictures, pictures of autographs and a lot of happy comments. I am so glad that our team was able to meet some of their heroes.

To me, this is what FIRST is about. We worked hard. They won a lot, but not everything. Finally, they got to meet their heroes. That's the best!

I must concentrate on other things now. Maybe someday I'll get back to writing about FIRST.

WMD is here!

Overall today went really well for Team 904. We had a few losses, one due to a penalty on our alliance partner and another where we got all tangled up with a robot in autonomous right in front of an opposing payload specialist. They just filled us up and we couldn't recover.

Unfortunately we managed to discharge some static electricity into the end of a network cable that was plugged into our Driver Station. It fried it, but we borrowed one and were able to continue and win. Tomorrow will be interesting as several teams had similar problems and there are very few Driver Stations to be found anywhere.

I'm working over some match statistics from today, so I'm cutting this a little shorter than normal.

My phone is charging and I'll be twittering tomorrow.

WMD is armed and ready

The FIRST West Michigan District event is about to get underway. Tonight some of the team went out to the field house at GVSU to get our pit area configured and run some practice matches.

Our performance was slightly less than stellar, however only the "big boys" showed up to practice. With that in mind, we need to get better overnight! Tonight I played the part of the "Commander" / Field General. I was the adult that went onto the playing field with the drive team and helped give them guidance during the match. I'm glad I'm not doing that tomorrow! It is an entirely different perspective from the point of view of the drivers! I was very impressed with how our drive team communicated with the other teams on their alliances, they did a good job of working well with others.

I took some pictures while on the field and will be posting them here soon.

Tomorrow is the start of WMD. I'll be twittering all day and blogging tomorrow night. If you are interested in watching the online webcast, go to CodeRedRobotics. Enjoy!