Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

They built a good alliance that could excel at all aspects of the game, and worked in unison better than anyone. Congrats 3940, 45, and 781.

DOUBLE BAKER! What does it mean???

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I think personally that any alliance that can triple is a formidable opponent IMO, 48 is a good team and I believe if teams sleep on them they will have problems at champs.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

http://youtu.be/jRHGOdjmkAU

?

Congrats to the #8 alliance. They knocked off #1 with the triple balance and never let up.

Fantastic kickoff for a new Regional.

Dean was there most of the afternoon.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I have a question about FTC teams: If they're meant to be an 'in between' for FLL and FRC, why aren't they aimed at a middle school audience?

EDIT: It's related to this thread because Dean just gave out new homework for every FRC team to help start FTC teams in a speech at Queen City.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I can assure you that we will be hosting some sort of event in his honour. If you watch SF1-1 from Greater Toronto East, Luke hit two shots in the final 30 seconds of that upset too. :rolleyes:

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

wasn't that fun?

Congratulations on your win

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I'm sorry to have missed this [blame Augusta]. Is there a video up/going up soon?

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Congrats to 1014 on your regional chairman's award! Well deserved and looking forward to seeing the iBook/eBook shortly.

Also want to congratulate the winning alliance of 45, 3940, 781 on their excellent performance throughout the elimination matches as well as all the other teams for some entertaining matches.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Just as a clarification to the "incident" with 3301, 829, and 2481.


There was no foul called on blue for the bridge the 3 foul points awarded for something else unrelated to the bridge.


When the question was asked after the match by the students the orginal thing the referees said was that it didn't matter since 829 was pushing them onto the bridge.

After the referees huddled they said that there was no foul since all contact was initiated by 829.

.............. If this is/was the correct call you really can't balance 3 robots. You can block the 3rd robot and claimed you were "pushed" into the others.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

If you approach the bridge from the other side, the opposing alliance can't deploy such a strategy.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Thanks to all the finalist for an extremely entertaining series of matches, and for making the Queen City Regional amazing. =)

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

This was a great 2 days of competition. The finals were incredible and I think any and all of the 8 alliances had a shot at winning it all.

It was cool to just watch matches, talk to teams and friends, and enjoy!

Well run event, organized, fantastic venue, great volunteers and FIRST staff.

I hope to be there with 234 in 2013 :)

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

It was a great event. Very well organized, great staff. The venue was nice. Plus on Friday I got a chance to order from LaRosa's for the first time since 2001. Thank you Jimmy for the updates all along, keeping all of the registered teams in the loop. That was a great touch. Having a practice field with a tethered and wireless side was an excellent touch. Lots of great robots and even more great people. I ran in the first Flying Pig Marathon, and now I can say my team played in the first Queen City Regional.

Congrats to 3940, 781 and 45 on the win. Great game play. (To team 45, are you going to try to launch one full court in the dome?) And seriously, the full court two pointer by the human player providing the margin of victory was just cool.

Thank you to 772 for picking us and 1270 for playing with us. I wish the autonomous teamwork had worked as well on the competition field as it had on the playing field, but it was a good plan. And I think the picture we have of the "double flip" will have to end up in our season highlights.

Congrats to our friends from Granville, 4283, for finishing in style with a last second solo balance for a win. You guys have the talent coming back to be grizzled veterans next year. Or maybe even at the Connect A Million Minds Invitational in June.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Overall, this was a decent event. Obviously, it was a rookie regional so everything wasn't perfect. It was a very strong rookie regional though.

The venue was superb. It's nice to see newer regional's using the "classic" style of FIRST venue. There's just a few easy tweaks to make it run a bit smoother from that aspect.

The inspections for this event were, by far, the most thorough of inspections that I have ever seen. This is both good and bad. I am glad to see all teams passing inspection. This will be a great attribute for those competing in St. Louis.

As for field staff, it was ran well every match that we had on the field. The flow patterns were well thought out, and actually made sense.

Aside from the obvious match (SF 2-3) that I could debate all night/day about, the on the field crew was pretty good. It was nice to have zero issues with the field and when things needed repaired it got done quickly.

I would like to thank 829 and 2481 for choosing us to work with them. We had a great chemistry and had a great time competing in the tournament. Just wish we could have played a little longer :)

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I noticed that too. It seems as if FTC is a smaller scale and more affordable way for schools to have FIRST teams. Dean pitched it as the step up from FLL and then FTC students can progress on to FRC. But if FTC is made for high school students as well it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Aside from the progressions speech...

Queen City was a great regional. For a first year event it ran exceptionally smoothly and was overall a fantastic experience. All of the event staff, from the judges to the refs to the queuing staff, were fantastic and great to work with. I'm glad that our team chose to attend this event and I hope to visit it again in years to come.

The one thing about the venue I didn't like was the splitting of the pits into two sections. While I understand that it was the only way to fit almost 60 teams into a space that size it felt like teams were segregated for most of the weekend.

I would like to personally thank 3138 for selecting us and 3492 for being a great alliance partner.

I would also like to thank the Regional Planning Committee and volunteers for doing such a great job. I can't wait to see what they can do going forward with this awesome event.

Congratulations to Jimmy Nichols for the Volunteer of the year award. You definitely deserve it. Congratulations to 1014 on a well deserved RCA and to 1741 for your EI award. Also a big round of applause goes to the Regional Winners 45, 781, and 3940 with special congrats to 3940 for double qualifying with their RAS. You guys earned it with some great triple balancing and hybrid scoring all afternoon.

The competition at QCR was phenomenal and I look forward to watching all of the teams that qualified for the Championships in St. Louis.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Match videos are on Ustream.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Also YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/delphielite/videos

In no way in my experience is it targeted towards middle school, take
A look at some YouTube videos of the past years robot games and robots for FTC. In small ways our games are getting infinitely more complicated especially last year, Get Over It, is where the FRC GDC got the balance bridges from. I'm surprised they didn't give 30 seconds and allowed FRC teams to try to
Balance on the bridges during auto for bonus points.

Either way in their complexity of the robot, FRC wins. FTC has the higher challenge to me, a lot fewer parts, but an unlimited amount of work time compensating.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Despite the Controversial Call, I hope everyone in attendance had a great time. We worked extremely hard to provide a great event for the teams.

For those teams attending, expect to see an email within the next few days asking for feedback, for those who won't see those emails, please PM me any feedback you may have. We will be meeting soon to discuss the event and planning for next year.

A big Congratulations to all the teams! I hope to see you all next year.

Congrats and thanks from FIRST team 3945
 

On behalf of my tiny team, I would like to offer thanks to all the teams who helped us and congratulations to the teams who competed. We had an awesome experience at Queen City; Dave, Jimmy and the rest of the planning committee deserve kudos for the result of their efforts.

1014 - Awesome job winning the Chairman's Award!
45, 781 & 3940 - You guys rocked in the eliminations, congrats
3940 - Rookies? Really? Outsanding job this year, congrats on winning RAS!
Jimmy Nichols - You deserved volunteer of the year, great job with the regional and your team emails!
3492 - You guys are doing great in your second year, great job Denise, Jacob, Dale, Josh and the rest!

Andy Baker - Thank you for helping us with our bumper issues and lending us your shelve unit, which proved to be quite usefull as a work platform. Also congrats on the success of 3940, you did a great job with them!
1038 - Thank you for lending us Josh to act as our human player, he did great in the end game and was awesome help on Thursday as we got our bot put together. Thanks also for letting me raid your tools as needed.
Ryan Reliford - Thanks for all of the Labview help, we finally got it together!
3492 - Thanks for the aluminum stock, which enabled us to keep our arm from beating up our controls!
Everyone else - thank you for offering help and support, what an awesome display of GP!

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I'd like like to thank team 45 and 3940, you guys were great alliance partners and extremely easy to get along with. As for our our human player he was pumped and was wearing the net that he got our final basket in the whole way home.

And by the way team 48, 3193, and 1038 you were some tough competition so thanks for making us work for it

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

It was our pleasure - you guys displayed awesome teamwork and execution out there.

We were so close to sending it to a third match. After your HP made his long shot, 3193 had two balls chambered up with seconds left. We needed both for a last second win. The first one made it, the second rimmed out. Very, very close!

I've complimented them all many times over already, but congratulations to all involved with the planning and execution of this event, along with all the great teams competing. I think QCR (it's cool enough to be called by its own acronym now) will become a big draw for many veteran teams from all over for a very long time. You have a fan in Team 48!

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Congrats to 1014 for winning the Chairman's Award, 1741 for winning EI, and Cybertooth for winning Rookie-All Star.

The matches and finals at the regional were fantastic! I was sorry I wasn't able to be there in person.

FRC1014 let us know more about that ibook you're making it sounds really interesting!

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

As a 1014 alum with a write up in the iBook you could say I've got a vested interest in it. :) I'm sure they will make a post about it when it is completed, but if not I'll make sure info gets put up here on ChiefDelphi.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Without those two points, the win would still have gone the same way, but it sure made for some real excitement! I'd actually give partial credit for the win to the other alliance's foul that match.

Perhaps the three teams making it up were average or slightly better, but the alliance itself was obviously superior. Being able to make the triple balance look simple (but still not easy) is not a sign of an average alliance. :)

None of the volunteer robot inspectors had ever inspected a robot before this event. We had help from two previous Lead Robot Inspectors, and some good experience with being inspected in prior years. With very little in the way of preconceived notions from the inspectors, the process ended up being very consistent.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

FTC is an extremely important competition. You are both correct in what you have said. FTC is designed to be both 1) a middle man between the competitions, and 2) to serve as a low-budget FRC team.

1) FLL is from elementary through 8th grade, so all of those years are covered. One of FTC's purpose is to make the step from FLL to FRC much easier. This can easily be accomplished by making your FTC team primarily a freshman-sophomore-/new-kid team, where the students are still learning a lot about FRC. This allows them to already be in a leadership, design-focused role and mindset without having to know as much about robotics "dynamics". In other words, they can be the seniors of FRC at an FTC level. This way, they're learning the basics of FRC, this being the more rigid, complex and creative design, while they are in FTC. By the time they take a large role in FRC, they have already learned the leadership and teamwork skills necessary to achieve in FRC through FTC.

2) Many schools cannot afford/have the manpower for an FRC team, so an easy step back (not meant in a negative or critical way) from that is to participate in FTC. FTC obviously saves you a very large amount of money, so schools with budget problems can much more easily afford to run an FTC program. This here is the primary reason that FTC is a 9-12 program, so that high schools that can't afford FRC can still run a higher-learning based program, or FTC. Granted, it's no FRC, but it's much further ahead of FLL, and is basically the best "compromise" between skill level and money. The skill level for the top teams of FTC exceeds the middle school level, and FTC provides a better low-budget replacement for FRC.

If you have any more questions or that was too confusing, please ask.

Hope this helps,
-Duke

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Here is the quick synopsis of what we are doing with the iBook. This is our tenth year, so we wanted to do something to commemorate that. Also, in our feedback the last couple of years it was suggested that we needed a more coherent documentation plan going forward. We do a lot of documentation but it has been pretty ad hoc. So we decided to create an iBook (we are a Mac school and iBook author is free software) of the team. We have chapters for each season, another about the Central Ohio Robotics Initiative and a final chapter with profiles of our alumni. We are in the process of getting as many of those alumni to submit profiles as possible. And we are still writing up our summary of this season. In the future we plan to add a chapter to the book each year, and have departing seniors each year submit their profiles. When the season is done we will be publishing it in the iBookstore. In addition we will have a PDF version (which has everything but the videos) available for download to anyone who wants it.

It has been fun to put it together. It also made me realize how much of our history we were in danger of losing. (For example, we have no pictures of the robot from Stack Attack. My son was born at the end of January that year so I had other things on my mind.) Now we are reconstructing that history and getting our alumni to submit profiles so they can serve as role models to the students. Thank you to Deetman, and to Dan Phelps who was a volunteer at QCR and a mentor for 1024, for being among the first alumni to submit profiles. Hopefully we will also be able to include something else we want: Our first "family tree." We were founded by mentors from 128 and 677 (one of them, Dan Kiracofe was also a volunteer at QCR). Like many FRC teams our alumni have gone on to mentor other teams. We want to document all of that as well.

In any event, I will certainly post on CD when we publish and let folks know where they can take a look at the book.

Jimmy I think you did put on an excellent event. In particular your volunteers and inspectors were top notch.

Travis, thanks very much to 48 for doing the webcast. And for getting it posted to YouTube so quickly.

Another personal note, Ryan Reliford it was good to see you again.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I'd have to take both hands out of my pockets to count the number of volunteers who came by our pits to see how we were doing. If the inspectors were in fact rookies, they were certainly well-studied and eager.
The two-day field communication fight we had on our hands was correctly diagnosed as corrupt firmware on the router (thanks to 3193 and Ryan Reliford for their advice and support), and the robot performed admirably the last two matches. Too late for the scouts to take notice, but as it turned out we got to watch some amazing teams battle in some astonishing elimination rounds. At the end of each match, I thought, "Wow. That alliance is TOUGH. They'll surely be champions." Then the next match, with different teams, I thought the same thing.

I thought the XU president and Mr. Kamen had wonderful and on-point messages to share with us. As Mr. Miller hinted at a water game, excitement washed over the crowd, but I suspect he was dripping with sarcasm. Koko Ed led a fantastic queuing crew - firm but friendly; quick with a glare and a smile, sometimes simultaneously. The referees were fair and just; there's no doubt that there were some tough and controversial calls to be made, and I thought they did so with grace.

JonDarr is the real deal. I had heard of his prowess, but he absolutely blew me away. His delivery was inspiring, informational, entertaining, and seamless.

Once again, I thought all the awards went to the right people and teams. Congratulations to all our friends who deservedly earned the honors.

Budget willing, we'll definitely be back next year.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

I agree on this point. I felt kind of isolated and in the dark on what was going on in the other section. I'm probably just spoiled with MidWest with the jumbo-tron screen at the end of the pits so you can see what's going on the other side of the black curtain, but the only feedback we got was random numbers being announced over the PA as teams were being called to stage. After a while it just became a sea of numbers and it was hard to keep track of where you were...

Kenton

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

We plan on trying to get video feeds in the Auxillary Pit for next year.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

What a great event...I had a blast. I was happy to be able to help out some teams as CSA and see so many great robots. Can't wait til next year.

Congrats to all the award winners. Special thanks and congrats go out to one of the best teachers I had as a high school student, Mr. King, and his team from Dublin, 1014. It was great meeting up with you here at Cintas and seeing your team not only compete well but also win the Chairman's award. Well done. I look forward to seeing the iBook as well.

And of course, congrats to all the finalists and the winners of the QCR. Hope to see you all again in St. Louis and again next year at the QCR. :D

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

So now that I’ve had a chance to catch up on work (and sleep), I finally have a chance to mention a few people:

Jimmy, Dave, and the planning committee - Congratulations on a fantastic inaugural QC Regional. You and the Event Volunteers had everything running as smooth as a veteran event.

Machine shop crew – I know many other teams took advantage of your services, but thanks especially for being so readily available in our time of need on Thursday.

Andy Baker and the Inspectors (new band name?) – Thank you for all of your efforts, including your assistance in a torn-bag-during-transport issue.

1014 – Congratulations on winning the Chairman’s Award

45, 781, and 3940 – A great display of teamwork and tenacity out there to win one of the most competitive and balanced eliminations I’ve seen. It was an honor to compete against you.

379 – Our NEOFRA friends. Nothing annoyed me more than to have to face you so early in the elimination rounds. Your drive team had that robot dialed in, taking the first QF match and forcing us to come back in a second and third hard-fought win. I always enjoy working with your kids—great to play both with and against you.

1038 – We have partnered with you at least one regional a year in every year of our existence, so I’m glad we could finally come away with some hardware together. You were a great alliance partner.

48 – Well, what can I say that I haven’t already? I’ve been a part of this team for 10 long years now, and I’m so happy to be a part of this truly memorable season. Sorry we couldn’t go 3-for-3, but there’s always the World Championships. Much pride and warm fuzzies go out to the students who have worked hard this season—your efforts are being rewarded.

3193 – The other half of my FIRST family. This was the first-ever FIRST award in our short 3-year existence as a team, and I have so much pride and love for each and every one of you. You really came together as a team last weekend, and you finally turned all of your trials and struggles into success. To our drive team…simply an amazing effort!

I want to especially thank an unsung hero: Keith Rising, Team 48’s drive team coach. Though he’s been a great friend for many years, I’ve never had a chance to work with him from the other side as an alliance partner. The calmness and positive vibe that he brings to everyone during the strategy sessions is amazing. Win or lose, he’s so upbeat and supportive of everyone, especially of the students. His effort to go seek out 3193’s drive team after they missed the last-second basket that would have won the second Final’s match and make sure they weren’t feeling down about the loss brought tears. He’s a great teacher and someone that every team should have a chance to work with.

Thank you all for a great event and here’s looking forward to seeing everyone in St. Louis!

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Going along these lines, I would also ask that there be a way to turn the pit volume down. At times it was horribly annoying to here some of the pit announcements at extreme levels. But like I said before, QCR had a lot of great things that you normally do not see at rookie regionals. Good job Jimmy and crew.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

People at the front of the Outcast Pit said the PA Speakers were too loud and the people at the back end said it was too low. This is a familiar complaint at many regionals actually. Not sure if there is anyway you won't have someone who is unhappy.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

We prefer "Secret Pit", but yes, situated in the back corner of the pit it was hard to hear things, but it seemed as if the problem was fixed after Thursday.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Thank you all for the great compliments. Among the Committee members I believe we are topping out at over 100 years of experience in FRC. We tried to pull together the best of the events we have attended and put it together at QCR. We realize we have a few tweaks to make and we are meeting in a few weeks to go over them. I have only received backa handful of feedback forms, please respond and let us know how we can make the event even better for next year.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

This jacket was found outside near the musketeer statue. We found this after taking pictures of the team. It is not ours, but we turned it into the Pit Admin, and were told that it would be either going to FIRST Headcourters, or the championships.

If this is your jacket you may want to call FIRST or ask at championships if you are going.

Re: 2012 Queen City FRC Regional
 

Yeah. If nobody else claims that, it's mine. I lost it. Yeah. :D