Off-Season Projects

[zdeswarte]

What's everyone doing as far as off-season projects go? I'm going to hopefully figure out how to attach an xbox controller to the OI so my team can use it for a controller. Other than that, I don't know what else to do for my engineering independent study.

[Joe Matt]

Our main thing is spreading the word, and making more complex, the careFIRST program.

[Pi Is Exactly 3]

Our school's music department made a joke to me about making the carts and such robotic (I think they meant motorized). They weren't serious but I'm sure they'd appreciate the ease. So I'll bring that up to the team. We haven't really done any projects for anything yet but this may be a good year to start.

[Bcahn836]

We are getting ready to show off our 2004 robot at a few different middle schools in the area to get people interested in the team for next year and the year after. But in order to show off our 2004 robot we first must put it back together and fix what programming broke while they were testing the camera.

[Lisa Perez]

The drama club actually asked us to make some objects for the sets of their fall and spring plays. Our fall season of robotics was insanely busy, so we weren't able to participate in the endeavor; however, we plan to be making one of those pianos that plays when you turn a knob for "The Music Man." T'will be fun.

[Jaine Perotti]

This off season I will be working on the curriculum for two Lego camps that I am going to run; an "Advanced RoboCamp" and a "RoboCamp for Girls". The Advanced RoboCamp will be open to 5-7th graders, and the RoboCamp for Girls will be the same...except obviously for girls.

As well as teaching the kids about Legos, I will also invite members of my own team (who have never worked with or taught legos) to attend the camp. There they will learn the basics of legos (and teaching legos -- which is an entirely different thing from just knowing about them), so that they can in turn go on to mentor their own teams. Our robotics team has only successfully started and mentored one Lego League team, (mentored by me) and it is time that others step up to the plate to learn how!

I also want to develop a workshop, to be held in the fall, for new members of my robotics team. This year we had ALOT of rookies join, but almost all of them dropped out, which is something that I would like to prevent from happening in the future. This workshop will be intended to:

1) Give rookies an overview of the FIRST Robotics Competition
2) Give rookies a basic knowledge about FIRST Robots.
3) Help rookies find their place on the team.
4) Build a sense of teamwork within the group.

I originally wanted to do this during an independent study course this semester, but because of scheduling complications, I couldn't. I think it will now become a summer project for me!

I also need to work on fundraising and marketing things for our team, as I am the Student Marketing Director, among other things. I will need to write fundraising letters, make presentations to potential sponsors, and other similar tasks.

And my team will also do some other type of technical offseason project... usually we rebuild one of our old robots to do something we didn't choose to do during the competition season...just to give the rookies some practice. For example, last year we converted one of our old robots into a ball handler (our competition robot for that year was a hanging bot).

There are many things to do... hopefully I will find the time to do it all!

-- Jaine

[Drew Hopman]

Team 801 was involved with the Space Coast Ballet. We created a robotic couch for their Production of the Nut Cracker.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...=robotic+couch

We also started some other projects that lets elementary students drive our robots, and three lego league teams.


By the way I tried to convert an xbox controller to work with the system and it didn’t work out to good. It’s near impossible to get to work because the xbox controller has a digital signal via 4 pin USB, and our inputs on the io are analog. We finally gave up on it because we found that you had to write a ton of code to get it to work correctly and we were not even sure if the processor could keep up.

Drew Hopman
President Team 801