Competition's done...and congratulations!

Congratulations to teams 71, 1986, and 2667 for winning the Northstar Regional! It took 4 matches for them to pull it out, but they did, and team 71's lifter sealed the victory for the red alliance.

Unfortunately, we did not make it into the finals. We had problems all throughout the competition and were not picked to be an alliance partner in the finals tournament. Keep an eye on the website (robotics.mnmsa.org) for photos from the competition and keep an eye on the blue alliance (theblueliance.net) for videos of the competition if you missed any matches.

We had a nice surprise at the end, though. Aren Siekmeyer, one of our most devoted team members, was one of only two recipients of the 2010 Dean's List award! The Dean's List award recognizes exemplary leadership and general outstandingness to individual team members. Congratulations, Aren!

Come see us at the North Star Regional!

We're competing in the North Star Regional this weekend! Come see robots from around the state compete in Breakaway matches at the Mariucci Arena at the U of M. The competition lasts three days, starting on Thursday, April 1, and runs until Saturday, April 3.

The agenda for the weekend is:
Thursday: Practice matches, where we get to test out our robot on a real Breakaway field and apply final tweaks to our robot
Friday: Seeding matches, which will determine whether or not we make it to the finals, and
Saturday: The most exciting part of the competition - the finals! These are the best teams facing each other, so you get to see the best robots and the best strategies in the state go head to head!

Come if you can for any of the days. You won't regret it!

Woodbury Bulletin Interview

The Fighting Calculators and the ERRORs were interviewed today by a reporter for the Woodbury Bulletin. We're going to have an article in the paper about what we're doing and it will be followed up by an article with photos and more after the competition. Keep an eye out for the article in the next Woodbury Bulletin!

FMSC was a success

In the end we ended up with a total of 37 volunteers. Our shift helped to feed 90 kids for a year, which is 153 boxes for a total of 33,080 meals.

Shop work last night

We made plans for our Chairman's Award presentation, and also the video we
have to make.

We worked on building two test rigs - one for the kicker, and one for the
dribbler bar. We didn't finish either, but both are close.
We also assembled a new electronics board - adding components around our
cRio (which we removed from the robot before shipping). This will allow us
to control the kicker & dribbler with our real competition software running
on the cRio.

And a couple people worked on the BOM spreadsheet.

It's off

The robot shipped a while ago, after a hectic night of trying desperately to finish as many things as we could. In its current state, the robot is not able to compete, but since we held back many parts, including the electronics board and kicker, we will still have something to work on over the period of time up until the competition.

Crunch Mode!

Well, we're currently in serious crunch mode.  We're finalizing everything (and we really mean it this time) since the robot ships tomorrow.  We're fixing our leaky pneumatic system, we put a winch on our lifter to add power, and making other last-minute changes.  We could be here a long time tonight...

Learning Experiences

Attending the mini-regional turned out to be a very good thing, since we learned a lot about how the game this year works.  We were originally planning to have fabric on the top of the robot that would catch balls that were returning to the field (see our "About Breakaway" page for more information), but after seeing that only about two or three goals were scored per alliance per match, we decided that it would be better to go with a solid top.  We are now mounting Plexiglas onto the top of the robot.  We also learned that it will be very important that we go over the bumps straight, since many teams who hit them at an angle flipped over.  We also understand the importance of the lifter, since we could easily double our score within the final 20 seconds of play if we lift correctly.  All this will help us greatly in the actual competition in April.

No mini-regional for us

Unfortunately, we were not able to complete the robot last night, and so we are not able to compete in the Eagan Mini-Regional.  We still are going so that we can see what other teams are doing and how the game will work this year.

Eagan Mini Regional Tommorow

We are attending the mini-regional competition at Eagan High School tomorrow, which will be a great way for us  to get some preliminary practice and see what other teams are doing with their robots.  It runs all day, from 10:00 AM until 6:00 PM.  It'll be a busy evening tonight, though, as we finalize everything we can about our robot, like the kicker, lifter, and everything else.