Finger Lakes Regional 2010

I hope everybody is excited for Rochester! Tonight we found out our drive team, back up drive team, captain, and a few other jobs are. Here is the list of our new positions:

Drive team: Christian (driver), Ally (kicker), and Collin (human player)
Back up drive team: Rachel (driver), Sammy (kicker), and Mikey (human player)
Captain: Christian
Safety Captain: Rachel
Back up safety captain: Mat
Scout master: Mikey
Mascot: Eric V.

We also have a change in coach this year. Instead of Mr. Hinde being the field coach, he has passed the job along to Mr. Fordham. Mr. George will be taking over the job of manning the pit for Mr. Fordham.

As a reminder to everybody, we have to be at the college tomorrow afternoon no later than 3:15 in order to pack all of our luggage into the vans and we will be pulling out of the parking lot of the college at 3:30. If anybody is able to get to the college at 2:30, please do in order to help pack all the stuff for the robot and that we need for competition before everybody starts to bring their luggage.

See everybody tomorrow! Let's win it this year!!
-Sammy

Drive team!

This year, our drive team consists of: Christian as driver, Ally as kicker, and Collin as human player.

Our back up drive team is: Rachel as driver, Sammy as kicker, and Mikey as human player.

We also got our captain too! Our captain this year is Christian!

We leave tomorrow at 3:30 to head up to our first competition up in Rochester, NY. As of right now, there is no webcast URL that we can find. Once it is located, we will post it on here for everybody to see. If you happen to be in the area, stop by the field house at Rochester Institute of Technology to see our robot in action!

2010 teaser

Our kicker in action while driving
A teaser made of clips of our robot drivng
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2wjHKz4HOk

Woodie Flowers Award

The Woodie Flowers Award essay was submitted as of a few minutes ago. The award is a very prestigious award, given to only one mentor at each regional. The winners of the award at the regionals and their team then goes onto Nationals in Atlanta Georgia to get the chance to win the award at Nationals against everybody else who won. We submitted the essay at the first competition we are going to, the Finger Lakes Regional in Rochester, NY.

More details will follow as we get closer to the competition and the hopeful win the award for our special mentor.

As of February 16....

As of tonight, the robot was on the ground driving and kicking the ball high and far into the air! We are able to go over the bump, use the camera, go under the tunnel, and do almost everything we wanted to do. We still have a few minor things to fix, but we are excited to have the robot running. The team is practicing our driving in order to figure out who will be drive team during competition season.

7 days until Ship Date!!!

Snow weekend!

Living on the East Coast of the United States is not always so great during Build Season. Between last night and today, the area where South Jersey Robotics is located got approximately two feet of snow. That's CRAZY!!! It puts the team at a disadvantage because we only have about two and a half more weeks until we have to ship the robot. And we only have it driving over the bump right now.

The team was not able to get into the workshop as planned on Friday night or today at all, and depending on if the Community College, which is where we hold our meetings, is closed or not, we might not be able to get into the workshop on Monday as well! Let's hope that this snow melts by then and we are able to get into the workshop to finish the robot in enough time!!

17 more days until Ship Date!

Hip Hip Hurray!

The robot is now officially driving! :) We got it driving last night, and was able to get it to go over the bump today.

Our robot weighed in at 96.2 pounds, giving us 23.8 pounds to work with before we reach the max weight limit of 120 pounds.

Unfortunately this is all I am able to post right now. We are trying to keep the progress of our robot somewhat under wraps so other teams don't find out what we are capable of doing just yet. Once we ship our robot, a picture of our robot will be posted on here as soon as possible, along with possibly a video of our robot driving.

I'll do my best to post again before we ship. Hope all the other teams are doing well so far!!

19 more days til Ship Date!