We have made it a K-Botics tradition to participate as a team in the KCVI Relay For Life event held each spring. This year the KCVI event raised over $17000 for the Canadian Cancer Society! 
Our team, made up of students, teachers and mentors, had a campsite in one of the basement hallways, and we needed to mark our territory by making a banner.
To pay tribute to our most recent all-night adventure we called our team K-Botics: LAMBeth 2.0 (For those of you regular blog readers, you’ll remember that it was in Lambeth that our bus broke down on the side of the road headed for St. Louis)
All participants were given T-Shirts….but after a few moments it was evident that there was a sleeve monster on the loose! 
After the opening ceremonies, where we heard from cancer survivors and family and friends, we did a lap of the luminary track with our teams. The luminaries are all dedicated to family and friends who are fighting the battle with cancer, or in honour of those who have passed away. 
Some people lingered to walk around the luminary track, which was open as a quiet space all night long, while others participated in some more lively events.
There was a dance competition! We did a pretty good job showing everyone our dance moves.
There was a pizza party for dinner…
…followed by a coffee house, where musicians showed off their talents….
…and there was a newspaper fashion show at 2:30AM! 
It has become a tradition for our team to put on a demonstration as well. This year it took a bit of preparation though. We needed to clean all the carpet which had been in the Transformix Warehouse since build season ended. We needed to vacuum the top AND bottom side of each roll. Thanks to the custodial staff for providing us an excellent vacuum!
We also had to ensure that the electrical system and programming were working on our Logomotion robot. Our Rebound Rumble robot is currently in a crate in Toledo Ohio, headed to Kingston sometime this week.
With the music pumping, our robot showed off for the crowds. It was great to see so many people line up to get their hands on the controls. We’re always looking for new members to join our team next year! Who knows, maybe some of these people will join our ranks.
As the night wore on, some of us took time out for a nap.
…or a quiet moment to read a book.
When the morning came, we were feeling a bit exhausted, but happy. We are glad to do our part to raise money for the Canadian Cancer Society.
In fact, our team raised the 4th highest amount! For this, we got prizes.
Thanks to Sam for being the team captain this year.
We’ve got lots of work to do this week to prepare for Waterloo, and the Cyberfalcons are in their last minute crunch time to prepare for the Montreal Regional this weekend.
We are creating a structural element that will protect our electrical system from impact injuries. We realized that in Oshawa making contact with the bridge can do some serious damage! This protective element will be dual purpose, and fit nicely into our game strategy.
Everyone always says to measure twice and cut once? That should also be said to “check the drawings twice and cut once”. We managed to make a variety of parts, but it took 4 tries to make the two that we were looking for.
Next time we’ll be looking carefully at the drawings, specially when we are making mirrored parts. Good thing we had lots of metal here with us today.
“Look, I’m holding it at 1/3 of the length!” -Olivia, grade 8
Our crew also got working on the shooter. We’re making some mechanical weight saving changes, and we’ll try a few different ideas to get more control over the ball.
One of the solutions to our control issue is to make sure the camera mount doesn’t shake. A few rivets did the trick!
K-Bots, we’re meeting from 5:30-10:30 Wednesday at the Plant 2 warehouse to continue working. Please bring your homework from competition.
We arrived to the competition and took our place in line behind our friends 1114, 2056 and 610. Team 188 followed quickly behind us, and together we ensured that today the mad rush was a little less pushy.
Everyone is so excited to get started in the morning….some of our grade 9 students were quite surprised to be waking up before 6AM on a weekend morning while on a school trip!
And while competition continued on the field, repairs (both small and large) happened in the pit. 
Our matches this morning were not as successful as most of the ones yesterday. We ended the qualification rounds with a 5-3-1 record, and in 16th place at the start of alliance selection.
We worked out a strategy with our alliance partners and developed a game plan over lunch.
During the elimination rounds the game plan changes from earning coopertition points using the middle bridge with your opposing alliance member to earning extra points for getting an entire alliance onto the bridge. 3 robots on the bridge barely fit, but we saw it a few times. Here’s team 1075, team 548 and team 4307 with a triple balance in the quarter finals…
….and here’s our friends team 610, team 188 and team 3360 who balanced like this for much of the afternoon!
We were not so lucky with our end game balancing act. We could usually get 2 robots on, but this time, the clock stopped with our partner half off. We were eliminated in quarter final play.
Our team continued to watch the rest of the drama unfold as the semis and finals progressed. 
Part of our team returned to the pit to clean up and pack all of our belongings. When in the pit, we’re super safe. Here’s Michelle, dressed in her purple, wearing her proper safety attire!
We’d like to thank our sponsors for all that they’ve done for us, and all of the support that they gave leading up to the competition. We would not be here without the financial backing, the material donations and the time and energy spent making our team what it is.
As we were cleaning up our pit area we got to know some new friends from team 2056. It’s a small world when we realize that our purple and blue families intersect with the Cyberfalcons! FIRST is great for joining individual teams together as families, and creating networks of teams among communities. 
Even though we were eliminated from play, we continued to dance up a storm!
We danced in the stands…and we danced on the sidelines with a few other teams. 
We watched as the finals progressed….it was a grudge match between an alliance of 1114 and 2056 facing an alliance of 610 and 188. We know these teams well–we meet them in line for the doors to open each morning! Some of our mentors were once part of these teams, and we cheer them on and watch in awe at the things their robots can do.
At the end of the competition, awards are given out to many teams. Many teams qualified to go to championships from this regional. Many congratulations and standing ovations were given to the following:
“The Engineering Inspiration Award celebrates a team’s outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers, both within their school and their community. Criteria include: the extent and inventiveness of the team’s efforts to recruit students to engineering, the extent and effectiveness of the team’s community outreach efforts, and the measurable success of those efforts. This is the second highest team award FIRST bestows.
At breakfast we made sure that everyone had washed and put on their deodorant. Our hotel has a deodorant vending machine!
Breakfast was followed by a brief organizational meeting, and then the carpool caravan headed to UOIT for the tournament.
We arrived to UOIT in the rain just in time to rush the stands for good scouting territory. Of course we were behind our friends 1114, Simbotics, who are known for arriving early!
We got some really good seats to scout from today. We will have to wake up pretty early to get these kinds of seats again tomorrow.
While our pit crew got our robot ready for inspection and set up the pit itself, the scouts learned how to fill our their sheets, and heard about our database that we’re using this year. 
One of our parent mentors had a great idea last year in St. Louis, that we should give away buttons that are little knitted hats with 2809 on them. From that point on patterns were made, and little hats were knit in many households. We now have 1400 little hat pins! Stop by and see us in the pit, or in the stands and get one–everyone needs a little purple spirit!
We got onto the field and tried out a few things. We shot a ball….
…and balanced on a bridge with team 2056. 
We also learned that balancing a bridge looks easy, but in most cases is really difficult to do!
At lunch we calibrated our robot camera on the field…
…while others ate lunch. Thanks so much to our parent mentors who arranged for a rather large Subway order for all 3 competition days. Thanks to Subway for donating drinks to our team!
Our scouting teams got into action in the afternoon visiting the pit areas and getting to know other teams a little better. Scouts also watched each match and made notes on the progress of each robot.
The blue bear came to visit for part of the afternoon. We’re looking forward to having a bit more spirit tomorrow when teams are dancing along to the music!
We continued to work on our calibration and testing until the pits closed. Tomorrow is looking like a very exciting day of matches. Please have a look at the 
We had a delicious dinner at Swiss Chalet this evening. It’s lots of fun eating at restaurants, mostly because they have straws with wrappers, which are a big source of entertainment for our team. “Straws are a weapon of mass destruction!”
Despite our differences, we are bound together by our mutual interest in robots, science, technology and our team. We are there to support each other through the tired moments, and even share a chair at dinner if needed. Hugs and jokes are plentiful, and that makes our days brighter and our team closer. We’re realizing now how tight knit we have become!
We unloaded a truckload of boxes and carried them upstairs.
There’s not a lot of space in room 107 anymore! All of the old furniture is on one side of the room, and the new furniture is being assembled on the other side.
As we unpacked the boxes, some of us decided it would be fun to hide out inside.
Some of us weren’t so good at hiding.
Our bin racks are looking really great. We’re going to know where everything is soon!
There’s another storage rack for the wall. 
We started putting together the workbench frames. With a little teamwork it became an easy job.
Most of us are pretty skilled at assembling things with nuts and bolts.
Others resort to hammers to make pieces fit.
“I’m going to use a hammer, because my name is Kevin” -Mr. Wood
We are currently having a $5 old team shirt sale. There are limited sizes and styles available–first come first served.
With all of the assembly happening in our workroom, we ended up with a lot of boxes, which we stacked in the hallway.
Our stack of boxes quickly was transformed into the most incredible box fort that we’d ever seen. 
The fort was ruled by a king, queen, court jester and a horse. They survived and thrived, expanding their kingdom halfway down the hallway. They defended their realm against enemy clans, and maintained peace until it was time to collapse the boxes to be recycled.
Programming needed a little tweaking to make the robot easier to drive.
It takes a little time to get used to the controls….
…and then it takes intense focus to drive the robot without hitting the cones. We saw a lot of promising drivers today! We’ll keep practicing, and have some driver tryouts in early February.
We’re organizing all of our tasks on our big organizational chalkboard. There is so much to do!
We’re working on our CAD drawings still. We’ve got lots of part drawings to get done before we can manufacture all of the parts. 
We’re prototyping various devices to manipulate the ramp. To make it more fun we split up into two teams (girls vs. boys) and had a competition.
We’re planning and measuring and cutting material carefully.
We’re working together, mentors and experienced team members are showing our rookies how to work safely.
It’s exciting to see our designs work well! Even if our designs don’t work well, we can learn from that.
We also get to meet family members…
…and welcome them into our big purple family. Family members love Tweedles as much as the rest of us!
After dinner we kept working on our prototypes for ramp manipulation. When tested on the ramp, the boys’ prototype was definitely the loudest, but the girls’ seemed to be a little more effective. Good work girls!
The test chassis got used again by our programmers to test some code.
4. Tweedles can knit!
The field’s barrier was finished today! The field makers have been making excellent progress so far and we are very eager to see the completed field.
Part of our rotations today was work on CAD. Some of our CAD skills are really improving! Today saw the creation of a CAD iPod Touch.
-
-
-
-
Important Dates and Deadlines
Links
Blog Keywords
award brainstorming breakaway build season bumpers CAD Chairman's Report communication community competition construction Cyber Falcons dance demo design electrical families field field trip First Robotics FLL FRC fundraising GTR kick off Logomotion Machining media mentors New York City Regional organization pre-season challenge programming prototype Queen's University rebound rumble safety scouting sponsors team building testing thank you Transformix video WAFFLES
