FIRST Summary?
 

Hello

I heard that teams must submit some sort of a summary to the FIRST organization. What exactly should be included in this summary and where should it be sent? Any details shedding light on this would greatly be appreciated.

-Team 1852

Re: Help Please
 

If you are talking about the engineering summary, that is due soon. For teams that are eligible, i believe there are five different awards you can win to be eligible, they can submit drawings, cad files, pictures, and descriptions of an engineering part of their robot for a FIRST robotics book soon to be published.

Re: Help Please
 

Let's see. There are two summaries that you can submit. One is a yearbook page. I don't know the details, but it's probably in the manual--Section 7 or Section 8 would be good starting points. The other is the book publishing one. If you haven't won one of the awards (all of which are technical) to qualify, don't worry about it. If you did, then you have one month to the day to write and submit everything asked for (detailed in Section 10 of the manual). I'm not sure if either is required, but if either is, it's the yearbook.

Re: Help Please
 

We are qualified to submit to the book as well. (Congrats to y'all) I believe (and this IS in the manual on FIRSTs website) that you must submit pictures of your robot alongside a biography if you will depicting your design and implementation of the actual machine.
(i.e. sketches, drawings, parts lists, build processes, etc.)

I think it should be mainly based on the ROBOT itself since that is the reason your in the book.

BTW which award did you win? :)

Re: Help Please
 

Getting GOOD photos of your robot itself is a MUST and is sometimes forgotten at the regional events and is typically forgotten in the rush to get the robot shipped.

We (team 1511) will be bringing our large chromakey green screen backdrop to the pits in Atlanta this year (look for it hanging on some wall near the practice field).

The green-screen background is good for robot and team photos since you can drop-out the background easily and subsitute the colors of your team, or a school background photo, etc. The chromakey can also be used for picture-in-picture video ala the weatherman on TV.

We've taken some good green screen photos of our robot for the book submission as well. Visit our many photo collections at rollingthunder.smugmug.com

Re: Help Please
 

We had this same problem, we had a bunch of photos of our robot before we shipped it, but none against a plain backdrop (page 3 of section 10).
FYI, though, the manual specifically says a WHITE background. The green will look cool, but you might want to take some on a white area too. At Boston we found a big white wall in the pits and took some pictures before we crated up for Atlanta.

Re: Help Please
 

I type quicker than I read sometimes. Your Chromakey background will be great and you can just edit later, but, for most teams that don't have access to that, you should stick to a white drape, wall, bedsheet, etc.