[thefro526]

For those of you who can't get to BB because of Firewalls and filters:

Originally Posted by Bill's Blog, Primary update

Good Afternoon Teams,

It has come to pass. The Secretary of State announced this afternoon that the NH Primary will be held January 10, 2012, just 3 days after kickoff. If you intend to travel to Manchester for kickoff, you may want to start looking for a hotel room right away. The media will be competing with you for a place to stay.

66 days until Kickoff
See you then!

Originally Posted by Bill's Blog, Working in the dark

Good Afternoon Teams,

Manchester was hit by a snowstorm that blanketed the US east coast in unseasonable snow, downed trees and extensive power outages over the Halloween weekend. Staff were back in the building on Monday morning and most have electricity back at home as of this morning. I hope all of you are safe and warm.

My thanks to the Manchester, NH High Schools Central, Memorial, Trinity and West for their support and assistance in allowing us to Beta Test hardware at River Rage this past weekend.

The following teams were particularly helpful:

Team 131 C.H.A.O.S tested Kinect & Jaguar in C++
Team 1073 The Force Team tested Kinect & Jaguar in C++
Team 166 Chop Shop tested Kinect & David* in C++
Team 811 Cardinals tested David* in Java
Team 238 Cruising Crusaders tested Kinect & Jaguar in Java
Team 125 Nutrons tested David* in Java
Team 2648 Infinite Loop tested Kinect in Java
Team 88 TJ2 tested David* in Java
Team 1922 OzRam tested Kinect & Jaguar in LabVIEW
Team 176 Northern Force tested Kinect & Jaguar in LabVIEW
Team 2423 The KWARQS tested Kinect, Jaguar & David* in Python/C++

We got lots of good feedback from the teams and are already hard at work following up on what we learned. I understand that field breakdown and event clean up at the end of River Rage this year was the fastest ever as teams noticed the snow already falling outside and packed up in record time.

*David stands for a new dual relay module that is being evaluated for possible future KOP use.

Ops asked me to remind you, if you are on a wait list for a competition event, please be patient. You have not been forgotten. Operations staff are working to move wait listed teams into events and will contact your team Main and Alternate Contact as soon as they move your team.

You should also know, the deadline to request a Bag & Tag exemption is Dec 2nd. Have you worked out a way to get your robot to your events? Be sure to read the Bag & Tag FAQ and review your travel plans now.

If your team is planning to program in C/C++ this year, you might want to checkout Ch, a C/C++ interpreter and scripting language environment available free to download here. This is not software your team can use to program the robot, but Dr Cheng from UC Davis tells me it is an excellent teaching tool your team can use improve your C/C++ skills as you wait for kickoff.

66 days until Kickoff
See you then!