How has your team changed from 2013 to 2014

[alexander.h]

I can honestly tell you that we significantly increased from last year's 33rd place to this year's 9th place finish. Even if this year's build team primarily consisted of 3 other students under 14 and me (who is 14), we managed to do better than last year (when we had a ton of people). The biggest problem that we had was that more than half the team graduated last year, so we weren't left with a big workforce. Thankfully, buying new machines and prolonging our build schedules to 6 days per week (Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri : 3 hours each day after school; Sat, Sun : 10 hours per day) contributed greatly. Imagine! Last year, we were only working twice per week on the robot. Then again, it was only for 2 hours at a time, so I think you can get the picture ... Buying brand new tools and machines, refurbishing and rearranging the workshop, ... these factors all contributed to this year's success. We deeply hope to improve even more such that our 2015 season will lead us to a regional win and a ticket to the Championship!

[safiq10]

So how do you guys see your team growing and what do you need to get there?

We just need to expand out into our community and "find new problems" because we solved the problems in our team.... That is what the judges told us for chairmans in OKC1

Robot wise we need new tools, new space, more mentors, and overall we just need to learn to brainstorm better. If we got some time with a good team and got a chance to see how they work I think we would be much better off. Also we need a deeper understanding in electronics and programming. We wire a basic robot to drive but vision systems is beyond us.

[alexander.h]

Originally Posted by safiq10

So how do you guys see your team growing and what do you need to get there?

We just need to expand out into our community and "find new problems" because we solved the problems in our team.... That is what the judges told us for chairmans in OKC1

Robot wise we need new tools, new space, more mentors, and overall we just need to learn to brainstorm better. If we got some time with a good team and got a chance to see how they work I think we would be much better off. Also we need a deeper understanding in electronics and programming. We wire a basic robot to drive but vision systems is beyond us.

You say you have trouble with vision code? What language do you program in? I have two different projects that should work with the 2012 and 2013 games...

[safiq10]

Originally Posted by alexander.h

You say you have trouble with vision code? What language do you program in? I have two different projects that should work with the 2012 and 2013 games...

We use Labview.

[alexander.h]

Originally Posted by safiq10

We use Labview.

Perfect, I'll send you a PM with the code.

[Kingland093]

Originally Posted by safiq10

Robot wise we need new tools, new space, more mentors, and overall we just need to learn to brainstorm better. If we got some time with a good team and got a chance to see how they work I think we would be much better off. Also we need a deeper understanding in electronics and programming. We wire a basic robot to drive but vision systems is beyond us.

That's pretty much the same with us. We know that we will never be one of the "super teams" (we're a small, not very well funded team from a really small school) so we can't focus a ton on outreach. We're trying to do more in our school though, but most of what we're focusing on improving is robot-related and fundraising

[kghaemi96]

Thanks to our AMAZING veteran members our team was able to pick up our broken pieces and begin rebuilding (puns intended). We went through an entire mentor change at the end of 2012 so we were struggling immensely in 2013. However at the start of this year we really changed our overall game strategy by going more in depth in the off season to make sure everyone was prepared. A lot of props go to our mentors who had to learn from scratch again since we had another mentor reset (once at the end of 2012 once at the end of 2013). We got through it with a lot of preparation and we managed to complete one of our best seasons in a long time. Hopefully next years team 2637 will do even better than this years.

My advice for ANY team that is struggling is to always ask for help. I guarantee 2637 would not be here if chief delphi and the entire FIRST community didn't exist. I'm sure you all know that though.