[ToddF]

Where to begin?

Our primary activities during the spring and summer are community outreach and technology development. In the fall, we do skills development and off-season events.

Specifically, we already have two demonstrations scheduled at special events at the Virginia Air and Space Center, in April and May. We will be hosting a week long RoboCamp at Christopher Newport University, using Lego Mindstorm kits, for elementary school students. We also host an FRC Summit, where mentors and students from area teams can meet for a day of presentations where we all share teams best practices and lessons learned, so we can get better together. In the fall, we will be setting up a (nearly) full sized practice field at the Virginia Air and Space Center. This will be a facility which is open to all FRC teams to bring their robots to conduct drive practice, run scrimmages, do demonstrations, hang out and have fun with robots.

Aside from outreach activities, we try to meet at least once a week to work on development projects. These can be new technologies we want to try for inclusion in our future robots, or working with new manufacturing techniques or equipment. Last summer we developed a West Coast Drive that we adapted for use in our 2013 competition bot, designed and manufactured a custom gearbox using CNC milled sideplates, completely cleaned out and reorganized our storage room, and installed a digital readout on our manual milling machine.

In the fall we work on projects that develop skills. We call this "robot building practice". The goal is to get everyone on the team ready for build season. Last year we built a battery charging station, and converted our summer West Coast Drive from dead axle style to live axle style. We also attended the Robot Rumble, in Richmond, and IROC, in Haymarket. This year, we will also have the public practice field to construct and support.

As I told our students at our last meeting, the high pressure part of the year is over, but now comes the relaxing part. You can be done for the year if you chose to be, but if you want to keep on working on fun stuff, you can. I certainly plan to, and anyone who wants to come play, is welcome.