Our programming team is happy with how things are working now! We’re done our calibration, and it is time for our drive team to take over the controls for the last few days of practice.
While all of this is going on, there’s a small group of purple enthusiasts who are choosing the colour to paint our robot cart. We’re thinking that “Victory Purple” would be a great choice…because it would match M.E.L.
While at robotics we have been experimenting with different hair styles…today Sam wore a hairband!
We shared snacks….
…and had a fantastic BBQ chicken dinner! Thanks parents for feeding us so well.
Later in the evening we welcomed more people into our big purple family!
We participated along with the sports teams and other school clubs….but we stood out with the BIGGEST group of people on stage….
…and the most purple! We showed off last year’s robot, since our 2012 robot is already in St. Louis.
Our school was excited to see the robot in action on the stage. Nobody got stage fright this year…our robots have suffered from that in the past.
The important part of our calibrating is to make sure the robot camera and programming recognize the targets!
The next thing is to be sure that the ball sits well in the robot shooter….we’re getting good at setting up the shooter after all of this practice.
It’s also very important to have an expert button pusher running the controls.
We’ve been keeping a stats sheet to track our accuracy. It’s been pretty good, but more variable than we’d like it to be.
It was nice to have so many helping hands at the warehouse today. For the most part, everyone was very useful.
…eating snacks…
…and having fun…
…watching blue flashing LEDs
In between times while programming was happening, we played some games…
It’s nice to have tall ceilings and big open spaces to pass the ball around.
We even take a crack at shooting baskets from time to time. The robot is much more consistent at scoring than we are though!
We’re spending our time trouble-shooting and checking for leaks and making sure that everything is connected properly. 
It’s not always fun and games though–there’s always homework of one kind or another that needs to get done.
We competed in Toronto and then in Atlanta at the championships after winning the rookie all-star award.
Parents and students are excited to see our robot, and some are brave enough to try their hand at the controls.
Many thanks to our school for allowing us to demonstrate our robot at parent teacher nights each year!
…it’s so nice to lay down and relax….it’s almost like having a beach vacation!
We applied reflective tape to our third target, and our programmers got right to work implementing the changes to the vision algorithm…
…while our mechanical crew attached the shooter to the platform.
Spring is in the air….and pool noodles have hit the store shelves. We’re stocking up for spare bumper parts for St. Louis….but in the mean time, they’re pretty fun to play with. 
Tomorrow we’ll be doing a robot demo for parent-teacher interviews (K-Bots, please show up at 6PM to prepare). Friday we’ll be back at the warehouse 5PM-8PMish working on calibrating the shooter.
We have got some changes to make on our scouting sheets too–scouts, please give input on what would make the process more smooth in St. Louis.
After the presentation we had a break for cookies! Yummmmm
Then we started working on our very long “to-do” list–it’s hard to imagine all of the things that have to get done before the 24th.
One of the things to do is get robots ready for our parent-teacher night demonstrations. We’ve now got two robots up and running! We’re certainly going to make an impression on all of the parents.
Finally, at the end of our meeting we were excited to see the outcome of our vision processing party on Thursday. 
It turns out that we’re pretty good at counting pixels. Our data set was very well labeled and served as a great set of test images for various vision algorithms. We are now very optimistic about our auto-aiming, and looking forward to some quality time in the Transformix warehouse to calibrate everything.
We found corners, and counted pixels, and inserted data into a spreadsheet.
It’s not the most exciting or glamorous task to do…
…but when we’re working together it is a little bit more fun. Thanks K-Bots for coming together to get this big task accomplished in one day!
We had cake too! That helps make tedious tasks more fun.
When the image processing party was done, we continued to work on wiring for our shooter calibration.
And started to debug the programming for Kasey III-Barbra Streisand. We are looking forward to showing parents all about our robotics program at parent teacher interviews next week. 
K-Bots, enjoy your long weekend! We’ll meet again after school on Tuesday from 2:45-6:30PM. Come and see charts and graphs made from all of the image processing data!-
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