What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Obviously, the FIRST Competition isn't all about robots. It's actually got a lot to do with making new friends and just having a great time with your team (Or even enjoying a few funny moments). So, I was just wondering if anyone here would like to share some experiences (Good or bad, overly serious or extremely hysterical) that your team has encountered during this year's build season.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

We actually had a great session last Friday
It all started about an hour before we were supposed to end.
Freddy challenged us that we wouldn't have a running shooting mechanism so we set out to prove him wrong. He bribed us the astronomical sum of...
$5 (if we made it) :yikes:

So we began working like a well oiled machine. Probably better than we ever have. We worked so well, our adviser Mr.B let us stay until 7:00 witch made Freddy sweat. :ahh:

In the end we finished mounting the motors and the wheels are ready to be mounted.
He claims we lost, but we won because we have achieved to a new level of team unity.

Wait a minute could that be what he was planning the whole time?

Could the whole thing be an elaborate plot to make us work together?...

Na

(Thanks Freddy)

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Week 1 Highlight: Watching Neha sit in the corner with the robot on her lap and working on it.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Highlight: watching our team mentor talk at 50 words/second when he got excited about the robot.
Example:

-"And then we can do this! And then this! And omg omg omg!!!!"
-"...chill out...it's not that serious"
-"no IT'S SO COOL. it's awesome man!"

it's great to have mentors enthusiastic about what we are doing. They turn back into 2 year olds. =)

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Ours would have to be the free-range hamster farms that our team decided to start up next summer, and plans to run a robot on hamster power. I guess that's a little random...

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Our thre best highlights from this year so far are both from yesterday.

One being the fact that we spent more time having snowball fights and POOF ball fights then actually working on the robot.

The second being the fact that we moved our practice facilities out of an abandoned elementary field Cafetorium to and abandoned storefront in the local mall.

the third will be posted in picture form later. It's pretty ghetto.

JT
229

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

The highlight for me was last friday. At dinner 1 of our mentors dared me to eat 6 Premium Plus crackers in 1 minute with no water. It's hard to do for those of you who have never done it!! And then another mentor dared me to finish it off by eating 5 packets of sugar in a row. I ate the crackers and wripped open the 5 packets of sugar and ate them all at once. It was crazy!! I was hyper the whole night :P

The next day I had sooooooo much sugar that the team is now going to ban me from eating any more of it. Let's just say that the build season is very unhealthy for me :rolleyes:

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

playing this on loop in the build room

having the guy in charge of the wireless block as a programmer is good. :)




BANG BANG BANG :D

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

WOW there are just tooo many but one of the most recent ones was yesterday we went to CiCi's and one of the students put his head next to the window from the video game area and was starin at us and when a kid wanted to go in his dad was tooo scared and told him to wait HAHAHAHAHA LOL

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

best moment for me so far would have to be last friday ( or two weeks ago i cant remember! ) a parent brought in bbq ribs for dinner that night. we took pictures of all our members AND mentors with bbq sauce all over their faces and hands . i have two videos too!

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Ha, well, definently the odd, spontaneous dialouges that seem to occur every year, without the intention of those involved. You know, like...well, I don't want to ruin it. :D

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

I pretty much enjoyed when I told the kids that before we ship the robot, they have to make me understand how it works. They laughed at first until they realized I was serious. Then they stood there, horrified. Eventually they began telling me about it.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

So far the highlights of the build season are my animation girls are doing an incredible job and I barely had to look over their shoulder. The team has shown incredible team spirit and in spite of not reaching our scheduled goal (we wanted a working prototype as of yesterday) we are still making incredible progress.
Hopefully this will be the year we break the pattern (since I've been here we've had great odd numbered years and struggled in the even numbered years).

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Our advisor letting us shoot POOF balls at each other, granted we were wearing our safety goggles :rolleyes:

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Our electronics team is ahead of the mechanical team.

Seriously... I've got the camera tracking the target, the gyro keeping the robot straight.. it's an amazing thing.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Incidentally, our team highlight probably had to be the accident in the chem lab, right before we left for our workplace.

Basically, one of our electronics guys accidentally broke one of the faucets in the chemistry lab. And when I say break, I mean he snapped the thing clean off of the pipe. Like Old Faithful in Yellowstone, the thing gushed about four feet into the air without stopping. Then our teacher ran in, panicing. Well, at least we had a plumber on hand before we had the chance to turn the school into an aquarium...

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

When our head mentor and a student mananaged to only lay 11" of weld in a 3 hour meeting, the mentor said, "If I was me, I'd fire us." :confused:

A low point of the season emerged when last weekend, for lunch we orded 2 2-liter bottles of Sprite, and no where, in the entire school, could we find cups. Luckily we managed to secure some bottles from the vending machine, which was empty this weekend, forcing us to build without a handy bottle of tasty iced tea. The terror! :D

w00t: Post number trivia of the day. Which team has posted a video in which 10 balls are scored in 1 second?

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

building the frame and chassis of the robot without having Dr. Cameron telling us to do it over and change this and that...

oh...a few weeks before build season we built an air cannon and loaded a pcv pipe with a cone on it and accidently shot a perfectly circular hole into a ceiling tile.. :yikes:

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

That was by far the most entertaining thing I've seen all year! He'll never hear the end of it. My car crash en route to our new building facility was rather amusing, too.

And we thought we'd just be building robots...

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

The look on Heller's face was priceless, after all.

But honestly, who designs an intersection like that?

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

my personal high so far this build season has to be the fact that im usually a webmaster, but this year, im doing the inventor award as well. Its kind of cool to have all of the head mechanical people and our engineers coming to me for things. for us, the web team is kind of an independant project, so i really never met many of the mentors. but it feels so cool to know everything that is going on, and for once, contributing some ideas. yes, i have stooped to the level of mechanical :ahh:

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

One of the early highlights for me was watching a couple of the students repeatedly hitting the target with impressive precision using a prototype ball shooter a few days after kickoff.

The "target" was another student. :p

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

first, some background: part of the parking lot at our school is used for motorcycle certification classes on the weekends. our team uses the lot for practice.

The highlight: getting the entire motorcycle class to stop and watch our prototype launcher fire a barrage of poofballs...

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

I think our team's highlight so far this year is how much our team has grown

last year we had about 15-20 students tops. This year we have grown to 45+!!
It's also incredible how everyone is working really hard and putting forth their opinion and best effort.

Also, the amount of our engineers/mentors has grown too. We have gained a spanish teacher, a tech ed teacher from the middle school, and about 5 new UTC Power engineers!

Its really awesome seeing how much we've grown

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

The early highlight thus far has been that we have a corner goal built, and a platform and center goal in the works. And we have carpet, courtesy of USC and a state government person officially declaring it junk, that we'll be able to test on. (Never before has 1293 built as much of the field.)

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

My best memory on the team so far this year would have to be while we were building our prototype shooter. One of our mentors dropped a dab of hot glue on the table accidentally, and a senior on the team happened to notice it. The mentor said "careful, it's hot", to which the student boldly replied "no it's not!" and reached out to wipe the glue off the table. He touched it, got burned, and exclaimed "Ow!". The whole team kind of burst into spontaneous laughter, as this isn't typical of this particular student, he is usually very responsible and listens to directions.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

this year it would have to be when we started to test our pro-type shooter. so we were in the hall and shooting the poof ball about 25-30 feet. so we were probably doing this for about 30 minutes when two of our trusty janitors showed up. so we started shooting the poof ball again. then the janitors started to kick the balls back to us in soccer form. at one point they almost hit our principle. needless to say they vanished and we stopped after that. this so far has been the funniest yet. its not that funny but i guess you just had to be there.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

I'd say one of the highlights so far was when we coaxed one of the girls into the path of our shooter (we told her it was off) only to hit her with 16 shots in less than two seconds. She then chased me with a hammer but it was worth it...

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

That's easy. We work in the school's woodshop. Above each workstation is a sign saying "STATION 3" (or 1, 2, or 6 -- you get the point). With the very first shot from the prototype shooter that my son built we hit the "STATION 4" sign with pinpoint accuracy and knocked it from the wires holding it up. The sign was up high and across the lab -- outside of the range we thought possible with our primitive plywood prototype. Much laughter and a fair amount of giddiness ensued.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

I would have to say being a rookie team that we have had alot of highlights this season already. But one of the funniest ones was yesterday when our mentor asked whether we had any questions. WE pretty much stared blankly at her. Then she forced us all to right down any questions we had (making the slightly fatal mistake of saying that there were no dumb questions...) and one girl asked which came first, the chicken or the egg. So we had this big discussion, and my sister and I both have always had a different view on it. So we were sitting there debating and even continued our conversation at home. :p

oh, and also being promised by our other mentor that he would wear a pink tux at the competition... :yikes:

=M

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

ours would have to be when i suggusted adapting the electronic paintball style hopper for the poof ball holder, and the busy, talkative room got... silent.
It ended up pretty funny, because after we trimmed it some, it worked well :P
hooray for randomness

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Today at the robotics:

Me: "Hey guys, lets go see if we can run the robot up the ramp."
Everyone else: "Okay."

10 minutes later:

*crash from robot tipping completely over*
Team Captain: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Lesson learned: Make sure that your robot is properly balanced. :rolleyes:

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

definitly two days ago when we finially circumvented the regulation not allowing us to use power tools

now we're only 2 1/2 weeks behind

and there was the time we built a prototype launcher out of an old bicylce in one of our basements the day after kickoff.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Me: I'm looking for a jumper. (for our CMUcam board)
Teacher (experienced former electrical engineer): You trying to start a car?

I had to explain to him what I meant by jumper... :D

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

get the camera that I swear has a personality to finally cooperate and follow the green screen. don't ask :rolleyes:

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

We found the bug in our drive train code. We are using tank treads and some code was written to make them both drive while using only one joystick.
Turns out it was a ">" instead of "<" type-error.

P.S. I know what you mean about the camera. It seems to lock on the target (as indicated by the LEDs) and then track to the lights, then lock and go to [random object here].

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

don't you love the simple mistakes?lol

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

My hilight of the season so far came tonight as we started to pack up and leave. Out of nowhere an impromptu melee started with the balls. We had younger students, older students, and mentors just going at it and trying to hit anyone they could. That's why I never leave a robotics meeting early because you never know what might happen.

Re: What are your highlights of the build season so far?
 

Finaly finishing machining/assembling our drivetrain, knowing that it is "complete". Tomaro the highlight will be seeing it be able to drive or not, if it does then that is our highlight of the season. If it doesnt, then it is lots of headache. The best thing is that I know we will have to take it apart again very soon because it weighs 50 pounds (by itself). Time for some weight reduction :D