Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Sounds like the Dayton teams could benefit from joining together and working together more. Maybe throw in those Cincinnati teams for good effect. What a concept?!

New mentor joins one team and ends up impacting several in the same region. I like that. :)

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Very cool! I know several WPAFB employees who are involved with various FIRST programs.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

True that. Life hasn't been the same in Austin, San Antonio, or for that matter, Texas - since Jess moved to town and joined the ausTIN CANs.

I see that the district model has been talked about in this thread.
We also have several new regionals since you were last involved. You might check out the events listing and see some of the amazing places that are welcoming teams to their little corner of the universe.

Did anyone mention the Dean's List Award? It's pretty cool. It's like the Woodie Flowers Award but for students.


Welcome back, Michael!

Jane

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned how many teams there are now. There are now over 2000 current teams and over 4000 team numbers!!! 1301 teams were registered for the 2007 season, and 2065 teams were registered for the 2011 season! That's 764 teams! FRC (and probably FTC, FLL, Vex, etc.) is seeing nearly exponential growth! To see how team growth, and loss of teams, has unfolded, go here. Team 358 has done an awesome job of compiling all the team records.

P.S. as a member of the Purdue 16461747 alliance, boiler up! (That's 1646, 461, and 1747 for anyone that wanted to know)

-Duke

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

that must be a new term... back when I was on 1747 that was never mentioned (I do remember talks of future collaboration).

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Almost. Highest team number in 2011 was 3883.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

I was accounting for the teams that are now registered, which exceeds 4000.
However, misinterpretation well understood.


I believe someone on your team or at least PFP came up with that a few years back. As for merging, i can almost promise you that won't happen, unless PFP membership dramatically decreases.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Thanks Jane!

Also, thanks to everyone else who's helping me here. Looks like FIRST has changed A LOT since I left. I'm really looking forward to getting back to it. Please continue to post changes that have been made since I've left.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

The latest change will be announced soon. A new regional will becoming closer to our neck of the woods. No official details as of yet.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

How so? Please elaborate.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Hi Michael-

My time in FIRST has been spent as follows:
2001-2005 - High schooler on team 11 in NJ
2005-present- Mentor on team 125 in Boston

A LOT has changed from when I first started. Mainly all for the good, with a few minor exceptions. As you mentioned, theres no longer that brutal (yet awesome) metal on metal contact there used to be. Robots tend to need to be less robust than they had to be 8 or 9 years ago, but obviously longevity is still an issue.

The actual games have taken on more of a theme each year, which has been good and bad in some ways.
-In 2008, called Overdrive, we had a game on an oval track where we needed to race around as fast as possible while simultaneously picking up a 40" diameter ball and throwing it over a bar.
-In 2009, called Lunacy, we played on a plastic playing field surface and were required to use wheels made of Delrin (this was to simulate the gravity on the moon).
-In 2010, called Breakaway, we played a version of robot soccer with very strict rules regarding how a team could hold onto a ball. Oh we also had to hang from a tower at the end for bonus points.
-Last year, called Logomotion, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of FIRST by playing a game where we needed to construct the FIRST logo using inflatable tubes.

The games have become more polished for certain, but the rule book has also gotten progressively larger. We have a pretty good Q&A system where teams can post questions directly to the GDC and have them make an interpretation of the rules based on your question. The Q&A answers become a appendix to the rule book.

This combined with the other responses, I think theres a pretty decent summary in here of what's different. Welcome back!

-Brando

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

no, no, no. They would never merge.... they budded off as new teams for a reason.

more like sharing design Ideas but building 3 robots with what each team felt is the best design. (what they had in 2010, I was at that meeting). the talks were of more, like making each other's parts based on team shop amenities; Harrison had 7 lathes for instance (I was spoiled) and would have likely done a lot of the lathe work for the 3 teams.

Perhaps the idea never went through...

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

Well, to put it simply, LabVIEW requires a resource intensive interpreter (itself) to execute its software. Whereas if you were to program software with the same functionality in C or C++, it would run much faster because everything's been compiled directly to machine code. If I say, for example, to create a simple program that will count from 0 to 1,000,000, it would execute much faster with the program done in C or C++. I believe there is an option to "compile" LabVIEW programs, but the programs in the end will still be more inefficient (as indicated by the sheer fact you need the LabVIEW runtime software).

I have similar opinions about Java (and MATLAB, which is just an offshoot of Java, for that matter), by the way ;-)

But yes, LabVIEW will get you up and running much quicker, and with robotics, the speed of execution may not necessarily be a huge issue. The reason I had been concerned with it before was because the data acquisition system I was working on was supposed to handle over 900 channels of data, many of which were coming in at a megasample/s, and the user interface to the DAQ system was to be an extremely complex one.

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

You could pull a Karthik and make triplets :D

Re: I've been out of FIRST for a while and decided I want to mentor again.
 

This is not accurate. Labview code/diagrams compile directly to machine code.

Confirmation from NI employee Greg McKaskle here: