It was an exciting start to competitions last week! We saw some great robots and some great strategies as everyone got their first taste of Lunacy. Some events ran into electrostatic discharge issues, but some solutions were found.
Here is some archived video from Week One events currently up on The Blue Alliance:
We can’t wait to see what Week Two has in store!
It’s almost time for the 2009 competition season. Are you aware of all the great online resources teams and community members have assembled? Here’s a brief guide to how to stay up to date before, during, and after Regionals!
The 5th Gear simulation is an exciting new tools for teams to use to try out their ideas and practice the game before their robots are finished. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to try it out at your Regional, and can give feedback to the 5th Gear team about what parts you liked and what parts could be better!The 5th Gear FIRST Robotics Simulation tool has been released to FRC teams (http://thinktank.wpi.edu/article/141), and there are plans underway to present it at multiple regionals (http://forums.usfirst.org/forumdisplay.php?f=1091).
The 5th Gear team hopes that through continued development, this simulation could be a great help to teams during their build and post-build seasons as a strategy formulation, driver training, and design aid. In order to reach this goal, a great help would be for FIRST students and mentors to express their interest in seeing future development. As they participate in Regional exhibits, and fill out surveys which study the usefulness of simulation for FRC, they will help the 5th Gear team prioritize development and meet student needs.
Here is a video showing the latest version of 5th Gear (to be released soon) being tested by FRC team 2068 from Osbourn Park High School in Manassas, VA:
The Blue Alliance has set up an e-mail address for teams to submit photos of their 2009 robots. By building a complete set of robot photos, The Blue Alliance hopes to make pre-scouting for regionals much easier and more efficient for teams.
To submit a photo of your team or another team’s 2009 robot, send an email to photos+2009@thebluealliance.net. Attach a horizontally oriented photo of your robot named ###.jpg where ### is your team’s number. For instance, if you are team 5462, attach “5462.jpg”, and if you are team 1, attach “1.jpg”. Automated scripts handle downloading and processing the attachments, so it is important you stick to this convention!
Send a photo of your bot to photos+2009@thebluealliance.net and help scouts see just how great of a machine you’ve built!
In this post, we bring you videos from Team 2702 and Team 1726. Team 2702 shows off their slick autonomous vision tracking of opponents’ trailers, and its looking pretty good! Team 1726 shows off a good system for getting balls to the top of a helix-style hopper. Great work guys!
In this post, we’re bringing you videos from Team 2775, Team 1629, and Team 1458. There are some great progress and ideas coming out of teams, and we hope to see more videos as build season draws on! If you want to see your team’s video featured here, send tips to contact@thebluealliance.net.
These are all great videos! Keep up the good work, teams!
Chief Delphi is down for server maintenance right now, but to keep you satiated, we’re going to feature a video posted by FRC Team 1646 showing off some shooter prototypes. It seems like most teams are still trying out ideas, as this is the only shooter video we’ve seen so far, but hopefully it can give your team some ideas!
This year’s FIRST Robotics Competition game uses the “Orbit Ball” as the game piece. With most teams unable to find additional Orbit Balls at Wal-Mart, FIRST has released official word on how teams can obtain Orbit Balls:
Game pieces for the 2009 FRC Game were chosen with the expectation/understanding that they would be readily available to teams from WalMart. Unfortunately, we recently learned that WalMart decided to discontinue this item. Remaining Orbit Balls are only available through WalMart stores in the US and are not available online.
FIRST will make our surplus of Orbit Balls available for sale to teams through www.logoloc.com/first/ starting noon Eastern Time on Friday, January 9th, 2009.
Orbit Balls will be sold as a set of 3 for $27.00 per set plus shipping and handling. Each team may purchase only one set. (We have limited quantities available. FIRST may allow teams to purchase additional sets in the future, depending on inventory levels. We will notify teams if additional sets become available.) The only color available is orange/purple (moon rocks).
Order soon, when they’re gone, they’re gone.
However, while you may not be able to obtain more than 4 official Orbit Balls from FIRST, Team 228 has come up with a clever way to make your own nearly perfect replicas. The have posted a whitepaper on Chief Delphi describing how to make your own “Gus Balls”. Check out the video below, which shows hands on just how good of replicas these Gus Balls are, and how you can make them yourself for less than $10 each.
Awesome. Thanks to Art and Team 228!
We’ve gotten tipped off to some spy videos of robots outfitted with Rover Wheels driving on this year’s field material. Thanks to The Nutrons - Team 125 and The Beachbots - Team 330 for posting these videos!
The Lunacy game animation has been posted by FIRST. Visit the NASA Robotics Webcasts page to view or download it in a variety of formats!
Good luck teams!
