Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Team 2081, Icarus, has modified our minibot pole a little bit to include a sensor for when the minibot crosses the deployment line and put switches at the top. Both of these are hooked up to a timer. When the minibot crosses the sensor the timer starts and when it hits the top the timer stops.

The real point of this post is I'm wondering if teams at Nationals would be interested in turning this into a fun competition at our pits. We thought last night of bringing the pole to Nationals and also bringing along a whiteboard to keep track of the top three fastest minibots and they would get prizes at the of Nationals. To keep our pits clear this would only be the minibot and not the deployment.

All I am wondering is if teams would be interested and if they had any ideas for prizes we could give out.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

This actually sounds kind of cool! For later in the weekend of course. Don't want to give away too many secrets.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Sounds like fun. I'll try and convince our minibot team to give it a try.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

What kind of prizes are we talking

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

We are open for suggestions!

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Just knowing that you the fastest minibot should be all the prize that you need.

Al, I think you just scared the other 348 teams registered for the championship (if not, they should be).

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

How easy is this to implement for off-season competitions?

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

We were thinking about doing something similar in our Hall of Fame booth, but got sidetracked by too many other projects to follow through. Good on you guys for following through!

One thing that we were thinking about doing was giving out "official looking" stickers that teams could put on their bot or in their pit...they should say something like "Team 2081-Certified 1.25 Second Minibot". We'd definitely slap one on the old bot :)

If you need any help, let me know via PM and I'm sure our media folks will be able to help you out! (We regularly bring color printers to events)

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Wana be scared? They were fast at Wisconsin, they were faster at Midwest, and they have had all this time to get faster!

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I'll put up a can of SPAM for the winner.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Stickers add too much weight....:)

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

We thought about doing the same thing for an off season event here in the Denver area. We are thinking of having two poles in a drag race format complete with lights. We'll be in St Louis so count us in.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

The way we did it would be very difficult if not impossible. We have two arms coming off the base with one arm having a photo sensor and reflective paper on the other arm. It works well for just eliminating human error in timing but it takes away half of the deployment area.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I'll put up a couple of TETRIX motors. Of course they're not SPAM, but they smell like it.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

It sounds like 1279 did something similar at the Washington DC regional.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

1279 had their pole set up at both NYC and DC. It was very interesting to see how fast some minibots actually were.

I think every team should run both their minibot and deployment system on a timed pole once. It'd be interesting to see how many 1.1 second minibots are actually 1.5 second minibots and vice versa.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I like the sound of that

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Well, since 2081 and SPAM are both in Curie, it does make sense, eh?

I'll bring the 'prize' to 2081's pit -- maybe someone can perch it on the top of their pole!

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

This sounds like a really good idea. I wish we'd had one of these on the towers at our lab while testing, but it's a little too late now.

I'd be willing to go just to get an accurate measurement of our minibot's speed, but I'll have to talk to the rest of my team.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Any chance of either publishing online or making available for teams that stop by with a flash drive, a list of teams and times at the end of the day Thursday and Friday?

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Does a team have to be attending the CMP to be eligible?

Rosie is not "officially attending" but Elroy will be available.

(I have to make a delivery of a case of Marshmallow FLUFF to a certain Mt. Home, AR team. I'm sure we could work out a jar for a prize.)

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I like this idea too. I know that we have been measuring minibot times using a slowmotion camera to film the climb then counting frames. We found that most minibots were generally about .2 slower than what people said they were.
Definatly a cool idea

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I dont know if we can do this, I'm open to hear what other teams think but I doubt many teams are willing to give away their exact mini-bot speed. Were more looking for it to be a game rather than using it as a piece of strategy.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

We are using video software with a timestamp and moving frame by frame....even more fun is lining up other team's videos and seeing how they'd compete. In the end it will be all about the deployment system when it comes to the 1.5 and below.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

If you're not going to count deployment how about a separate category for minibot + deploy?

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

hey im a mentor for team 326 and im driving to st louis and i will bring my case of 1.1 sec minibots from michigan.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Just finished the award we will be giving out. Its been laser etched, and has a led backlight, power by a 5 volt wall power supply.

Mini-bots will start at the bottom of the pole, get turned on. As they race upwards they will cross the deployment line were there is a photo eye that will starts the timer. When the mimi-bot triggers the plate at the top, timer stops. Timer goes by .001 seconds.

Fastest (lowest time) wins!

Good Luck!!!

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Sweet looking award! I am already excited about seeing who's got the fastest climber. :)

(Oh, and this beats the heck outta my can of spam.)

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

To Team 2081:

Just a note to thank you for this very nifty award. I only regret that things are so hectic during and after eliminations at Champs that I never got the chance to thank you personally for the award and for running the challenge. Some creative work went into the making of this award (it is even back-lit with an LED light!) and it will have a place of honor on our trophy shelf. It was gratifying to see all of our work on our minibot pay off both on the field and in your challenge. Thanks for adding to our fun at Champs!

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Somehow this doesn't surprise me that you guys win!

The practice-field minibot towers should all have been equipped similarly at every regional.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

What was the winning time?

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

It would be cool to see the top 5 or so.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I believe they posted our time as 0.903 sec. (not sure about that last digit.) Someone was close behind with .92 or .93. Wish we had taken a picture of the results whiteboard.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

When was this, because I know that on Friday morning the Captians (3098) told me that their minibot was timed at about half a second.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I'm pretty sure you heard wrong. I'd be very very surprised if they had a .5 sec minibot.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Physics would be very surprised if they had a .5 second minibot

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Wow! Now I know why our alliance's minibots were getting their butts kicked almost every match in the eliminations! :-)

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I saw the board, it wasn't .5 but I think it was 7.3 something. I know it was under a quarter second... and they were in second place. The fastest one I saw on Friday morning was .6 (some numbers after the .6 not .6 flat), sorry I can't remember the team.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Keep in mind, the minibot has about 18 inches with which to accelerate before the timer starts.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

We were having some technical difficulties on thursday which led to a .69 and .7 second timing of a minibot. We fixed the problem and had those two minibots retimed. I'm still trying to get the official results but 1986 was in the very low .9s i know. I want to say somewhere around .905, I will get the official results and post them here asap.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Yes our time was posted as .69 and another one in the .7s for most of the weekend before it was realized that his was probably a technical error, so many people saw those times posted. As much as I would love to have a .69s minibot, this was apparantly an error as we clocked at .90x in two separate runs later on.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Thanks for everyone coming out to our pits and having their Mini-Bots timed.

Yes there was a problem with some of the bots:eek: - the magnets they had were strong enough to induce a voltage in the wire that were in the inside of the pole for the switch plate at the top. That voltage caused a false trip to the timer. After removing the wires from the inside of the pole, this problem went away:) The students were explained this and also learned a term called "active low" and why it's used. To bad I didn't remember this from my school days when I designed the timer.

The Mini-bots that were tripping the timer early (and causing the supper low times) were retested and had their times corrected. And as Luck would have it, it didn't change their standings.

Congratulations to FIRST Team 1986 Titanium Robotics with a time of 0.900 sec.
They won the award we made, and the can of SPAM that was donated as a prize as well.

The top 5 teams area as followed:
1986 Titanium Robotics 0.900
3098 The Captains 0.920
2984 The Vikings 0.922
1731 Fresta Valley Robotics 0.955
931 Perpetual Chaos Robotics 0.965

Thanks again for stopping by, and if you didn't get timed - maybe we'll meet up and do this again at IRI???
(I would still like to see one hit the top, fly off, and then deploy a parachute)

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

I'll put up another can of SPAM for the IRI winner, if this happens.

RE: parachutes and such -- it would be really cool to see a minibot competition for style points. :cool:

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

How many teams competed?

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

About 40. We had this thread on here to let poeple know and also the students place flyers on the bathroom doors. - We even had a parent come over to check it out after reading that flyer!

One of our other local teams #2481 - Roboteers, posted a time of 0.818, but that was with a deployment ramp. This contest was mini-bot only; because we didn't want a line of robots blocking the walkway. So we told them this time didn't count.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

It was an honor to kick your minibot's butt in eliminations.:D
Seriously, it WAS an honor to achieve 2 very close matches against you in the quarters. Of all the regional video I watched this year, the most jaw-dropping tube scorers for me were 987 and 1717, and it was an exciting coincidence to get to play both of you on Curie (although not too helpful to our record.) While we were a pretty capable hanger, we felt this minibot was the way to challenge prolific scorers like you, and that is indeed how it played out.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Some of those really fast times had to be re-run. The wire to the sensor that detected when the minibot was at the top was run through the center of the pole, and the magnets on the minibots were causing a pulse in this wire which made the circuit think the minibot had reached the top before it actually had.

I'm not sure what the final times were, but I might be able to find someone else on the team who knows...

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Darrin posted them earlier:

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

973 did not compete in this minibot challenge but i do know that every time our robot was lined up at the pole at the 10 sec mark, it reached the top before 9. 1114 told us that they had taken high speed video of every robots minibot at champs to see who had the fastest minibot with deployment. According to some of them 973 was one of the fastest at championship.

If we had known about this competition we probly would have entered. Congrats to Team 1986, it would have been nice to race you in einstein.

Re: Minibot Competition at St. Louis
 

Well, I was wondering to do with all the minibots we have. I was going to use them for a class competition. But this idea seems better