Today marked a milestone in our season. This is the last day that we’re testing and practicing in the Transformix warehouse!
We practiced shooting A LOT!
The good thing is that we were also scoring A LOT!
At the end of the day we packed up our gear, disassembling our test rig…getting ourselves ready for St. Louis.
Our programming/drive team is optimistic about how well we can perform in St. Louis. We’ll be playing in the Archimedes division with our friends 1114, 2056 and 781. We’re looking forward to a strong Canadian presence in the division.
K-Bots: enjoy the weekend off–do all your purple laundry! We’ll see you on Monday after school for a meeting and to finalize all the details. Tuesday we’ll meet at 7:15PM to load the bus.
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!
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.
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.
…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.
Today after school we repaired the crate walls…
…and strapped robot and bumpers down so they won’t jiggle around too much in transport.
The finishing touch was to screw down the top of the crate.
Here are two very proud crate assemblers. Many thanks go out to the crate builders who put in a lot of work last year. We all owe them one. 
Just to prove that the crate is solid, they gave it a kick for good luck.
Miss Compomants will be making her way to St. Louis via FedEx tomorrow! Hopefully it’s a smooth journey.
Today was also a special day for two K-Bots. Happy birthday to Jacob and Brennan!
…and work on getting encoders and chain back on our shooter. There were some discussions as we analyzed the mechanics of the situation.
After deciding on a course of action, we got to work.
Tomorrow we’ll have the chain back on!
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.
