Yes indeed I am back in my native land of Seattle. I’m almost to my house now.
In case you didn’t know, I went to St. Louis for the FIRST world championships. It was great. Unfortunately I left before everything finished because my flight left before everything ended.
I’m back home again, after a slightly disappointing Autodesk Oregon Regional. There were some Super Bowl XL like calls, but we did fairly well nonetheless. We lost in the semi-finals to the eventual winning alliance.
We are working on making improvements to our robot, that hopefully will give us a better performance on the field.
Today, the qualification matches at the Autodesk Portland Regional finished up, with us performing much better. We ended up in 34th seed. When the top 8 seeded teams were choosing, we were lucky enough to be chosen by Team 8, The Vikings, and Team 1983, Skunkworks.
At the beginning of the elimination tournament, our first match we touched the opposing alliance’s tower during the finale, and judges are deciding h0ow to handle that situation during the elimination, they are claiming our entire alliance got disqualified, after they had said our robot just got a red card, which meant only our robot could not complete next match.
I’m slightly confused by the situation, but I am very pleased that we made it into the elimination tournament.
Here at the competition, because of certain pieces not coming together correctly, and our head programmer makes some very bad decisions. He blows off time that could be used. We’ve had so many issues, that we thought all the problems were fixed before the competition.
Also to facilitate more ranting, one of the mentors decided he has so much knowledge and that he needs to take over the club’s website. Thing is, he ain’t smart, at all. He doesn’t know about the PulseAudio exploit and went and used Fedora 8, a vulnerable version, in a world facing environment. The opposite of a good idea.
So now I’m debating whether I should just quit the club because I can’t get those two problem people out of my way from participating the way I want to.
I’m in my bed at my hotel, in Portland. Tomorrow starts the practice day for the Autodesk Oregon FRC Regional. We have some work to do on our robot, but we hope to be in practice matches by 13:00 (1:00pm). We brought our CNC mill, so we’ll have peak efficiency and ability.
I’m waiting for the school announcements to end, or mention the competition I’m going to. Oh look, they didn’t mention it. I’m still excited for the competition.
We got a loaner trailer for our stuff, while our own trailer is finished being made and decorated. We were packing it last night, and we must finish that today.
I’ll post from Portland.
The date for FIRST Robotics Competition teams to ship off their robots is drawing nearer. I’m in the Tahoma Robotics Club, and I am getting to see our robot come together. We hope that our robot will do very well at the Portland and Seattle Regionals, taking us to the National Competitions at Atlanta.
The Build Season started on January 9th, with the season kickoff. On that day, FIRST announces the game robots are to play in competition that season. After the announcement of the game, our club went back to our school to think of strategies to play the game this year. We get 6 weeks to design and build the robot from scratch.
Our team has a fairly long way to go, and only 8 days to get there. I’m feeling that we’re going to finish just barely ahead of time, and we’ll do very well at competitions.