[capnrmorgan]

I will offer to forward a copy of the manual any team interested. It is a big document and I may have mail it sections or burn new copies on CD. I may post it as white pages on Cheif Delphi (If it is not already there)

I would extend our gracious professionalism to any and all and share what we found out. I found with the incredible short time frame and my own personal challenges to work in a very large school system makes me the likely VEXpert. The political side of the whole thing was my greatest achievement !!!

My concerns as a new FRC and Veteran VEX team is that the FIRST organization needs to encourage all the team to prepare for next year. FIRST needs be more positive and supportive of the VEX system. What will be the format and schedule for our new VEX division? What will be the entrance fee. Will we compete in a triple play tetra like small scale version? Will we be invited to the Regionals? When is our kick off? These and other questions need to be addressed by FIRST for the VEX Teams to get excited about next year. Right now it is too early to tell and no one knows the answers hence the delay and wait and see attitude.

Challenges: I wish I knew at Atlanta.
1) At the competition, We needed the teethers and no one told us clearly this was the case. I would encourage anyone to get a 50 ft 4 wire phone extention cord and add it to the tool box. We were told we would have practice RC chips to practice with. There were no chips, so our practice season of about one hour was wasted, when we tried to practice, our robot went nuts ( too many signals ). We also competed right after opening ceremonies: Too short of a practice seasion for first timers. We finished the first day 1-3. We came back the next day and won Two for a total of a 3-4 record. We were not picked in the quarterfinals and were done Friday at noon. We traveled a long way to be done before the others even got started....

2) At home. We needed to have a practice field. We were unable to get together with parents to make this happen. I would encourage the parents to get together and make this happen by the 2nd week next time ! We also didn't find out until we were competing that the mats where face down, not up. Double gears on the top to prevent stripping would have helped during our Demo. (The robot failed in front of the whole staff during a Fac Meeting...)

3) The kit was a beta version 0.5 and the recomendation for metal inserts in the gears to prevent rounding and making mirror rails. (they were all left handed) were promised in future releases. Plus onboard programming, omni wheels, vision, the works....Lets see what happens....

+++ of the system. The kits are clean and the metal easy to cut and work with. Without the need to manufacture parts, we were up and running in 2 hours. The hard part was finding a solution to the challenge and making it work. The bot went through three revisions and extentions before we were ready to compete. It finished as a 4 wheel drive bot with double gears on the top to prevent stripping... With us only meeting as a Team twice a week, I would say VEX was a hugh success

Encourage FRC teams to use VEX for Modleling their challenge. At $300 it is not a bad investment to get the challenge bot modeled before you start ripping Aluminum and Drilling Holes...for the big bot.

Also more metal kits go for $78, extra Gears $24 . You could be in the VEX challenge for as little as $600 ( one kit and 3 sets of metal and gears ) A great way to get the other TEAM members to build. (They are great to play with just a kit bots.)

I am also going to have a Girls Only Meeting to encourage would builders to get their hand dirty and build a robot. The VEX allows us to do this.

We had two sets of 6 building two robots. Our second bot didn't get as far, so we let the other 6 go with the idea to finish the robot as a baby bot. In the future I would push the slackers harder to finish !!!

To get the season ball rolling, we are thinking of using the other pieces/kits to get our Tech classes to challenge the Science Classes in Sept on one of the challenges offered in the kit. Over the summer, I am gathering and getting organized to launch a full assult on the school in the fall....

Great seeing you all !!! I wish I knew about MARM being a FRC Show and Tell. I would have been more prepared with a VEX DEMO !!!

Great seeing you all...

R. Morgan