[Specialagentjim]

Hey, just found this thread sitting out on the portal, my team told me about it but I hadn't seen it yet...

I noticed one of the PAW members posted a post about us getting 10k for scouting...WHAT?!?

Our scouting/video system is no where near that. All of our network equipment for nats was donated by cisco for the purpose of competition. They provided WAPs, routers, etc. The rest of our networking equipment is old motorola equipment, that's good enough (sorta) for us, but not to be used in a commercial motorola environement. That was seen in the case of our main router, which is quite a few years old, but it ran what we needed it to run.

Server-wise, our 4 main video streaming servers are some Dell Optiplex workstations that we borrow from the Motorola plant we build the robot at. Those machines are borrowed for a few weeks, ghosted back to factory afterwards, and put right back. Our video encoder machines are Dell laptops checked out in the name of various students from our school, which has found numerous government grants to purchase them with.

Sooo, if we got 10k somewhere, I'd love to know where, lol. On the note of money, like Mark Hamilton said, we get almost no money from school. In fact, at this moment, our budgets are frozen as they do about halfway through the year every year. At this point in the year, we are not allowed to spend any money (this freezeing process happened either before or during build season). The only way we get money to go is from asking some of our local businesses for money, and kindly placing them as a list of our sponsors on our school's website (www.dillardhigh.com, a totally student designed and run website).

I just wanted to clear that point up , if anyone from 108 knows differently, please feel free to correct me, but this is as I know the facts to be.

We're always striving to do the best we can. Sometimes we do well, sometimes we don't. It's not the winning of competition or the ability to compete at more competitions that REALLY makes FIRST worthwhile, its the knowledge you gain. Team 108 this year had numerous transimssion problems, we pulled our transmission and reworked it 11 times between matches at UCF, totally taking the tranny apart, fixing anything broken, and shoving it back together for a last minute install into the robot before a match. We were really down about it for a while at competition, but then we realized, its not about how well you compete, its what you learned. Our whole team learned soo much about force, torque, shaft length issues, gear ratios, and machining processes than we've ever learned, all because of a tranny with a few design flaws. We took these problems and turned them around to redesign a few aspects and ended up with a GREAT transmission by nats. FIRST is about learning, and there's almost no dedicated 108 team member that dosent know more about a transsmission this year than they ever really thought they would know.