USA Science and Engineering Festival - 2010

[gblake]

Originally Posted by RoboMom

Exhibits and performances posted:
http://www.usasciencefestival.org/2010festival/expo/

There are a few FIRST-related booths, including one for an individual FRC team.
Also a booth for The Dean of Invention: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=86708

In addition to the NM-4 tent Jenny mentioned (more or less across the street from the Air & Space Museum) where Jenny and I will be introducing a few thousand of our new best friends to the RECF/VRC; up at the foot of the Capital building steps, in the NM-1 area, Lockheed Martin and FIRST are filling a tent with a 5th Gear set-up and a 20' x 30' mini-field where guests will able to drive some Breakaway bots.

That's where you will find Jared and reps/robots from 5? other FRC teams.

Both of these exhibits are in big 30 x 80' tents - It will be hard to miss them.

See you there!

Blake

[Dantvman27]

Team 241 is hosting the ONLY satellite event for the USA Science and Engineering Festival 2010 in New England. It is free and you should all check it out. www.nhtechfest.org

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Blake,
Maybe we'll be able to see your display. The DEKA tent is not far from the Capitol. Looking forward to a great event.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Blake,
Maybe we'll be able to see your display. The DEKA tent is not far from the Capitol. Looking forward to a great event.

Al - That will be a delight - I probably won't get to see any of the Expo beyond "my" tent's walls.

[mplanchard]

SolidWorks will be there too in booth (tent) 1365. Stop by and say hi. Engineers at play. Marie

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by gblake

That's where you will find Jared and reps/robots from 5? other FRC teams.

Yep, there are 6 FRC teams from PA, MD, and VA who are participating in this exhibit (I won't try to name them because the only information I have is somewhat outdated).

Come drive our robots!

[mplanchard]

What a great day to be an engineer and love robots! If you are anywhere near the Washington DC area, this is the place to be today. The USA Science and Engineering Festival is filled with amazing exhibits that makes you want to explore, touch and experience science, math and engineering that is just fun. I saw Dean yesterday during an interview with Engineering.com and he talked about his passion, FIRST and his new TV show Planet Green. SolidWorks is on Pennsylvania Avenue between 13th and 14th we are sharing a 30 foot tent with the STEM Academy, they have a large track out front with cars you can race. Our new robot tutorials www.SolidWorks.com/Robotics are a big hit.

More information can be found at my blog http://blogs.solidworks.com/teacher/...stival.html#tp - I am so excited to be here.

Marie

[falconmaster]

Hey everybody. We are at the USA Science & Engineering Festival! We are doing a stage presentation at 2pm today on the Wilson Stage. If anybody is out here for teh event come see us!

We are doing a presentation called Building ROV's for Underwater and Space.

[JaneYoung]

Originally Posted by falconmaster

We are doing a presentation called Building ROV's for Underwater and Space.

Awesome! That's going to be an interesting presentation, I'm sure.

Hope everyone is having a great time at the USA Science and Engineering Festival - 2010.

Jane

[Foster]

I went on Sunday and spent most of my time at the RECF/VEX/LM tent. (How can anyone pass up a chance to hang out with Jenny for the day?) It was very impressive with all the future roboteers that came through. (4,000 on Sat, I'm guessing about that number for Sunday too) They had a blast playing robot soccer with the VEX robots.

Lots of kids had on the "I Love Robotics" stickers and were excited about what they had seen. We also had lots of roboteers that were interested in Lego and I sent them "down the street" (go to the big space capsule and turn left) to learn more about FLL,

We also had a batch that knew how to drive the XBox like controller already, they had been down at the ROV tent driving around. Those kids were really excited about that.

I was able to walk around before things got going at 10. The huge numbers of Science related tents was amazing. All the people were jazzed about what was going on and all the stuff to see. In mid afternoon people were saying that they were coming next year for two days so they could see it all. (And I got to meet Bill Nye the Science Guy, almost as cool as hanging out with JVN)

The sponsors of the event should be very proud of what they've done. Thanks Lockheed Martin for your support, I'm guessing we'll have 100's of new roboteers joining us soon.

[JVN]

I discussed some of my experiences at this wonderful event here:
http://jvengineering.blogspot.com/20...on-part-2.html

Very, very cool. Kudos to Lockheed Martin for everything they did to make this happen...

-John

[JesseK]

6 FRC teams had hundreds of little kids driving their robots. I'm sure our robot got more field time there than all of our previous robots combined .

The teams were
7 (MD)
341 (PA)
623 (VA)
1389 (MD)
1885 (VA)
2068 (VA)

Total drive time on the field was about 2 hours per robot. Talk about lessons in quality! There were some great nuances that came from it too:
- Children will tell you exactly how complicated your 'simple' controls are. Even kids who play Halo are not necessarily more inclined to like halo-style controls for a live robot.
- Long endurance usage of Mecanum drive is not recommended due to excessive maintenance
- Jaguars do not mix with dust & humidity
- Use locktite if you use the tapped end of an AndyMark transmission shaft to keep your sprockets/hubs on the transmission, especially if the transmission powers the drive wheels
- AndyMark Toughbox Nano's are beastly so long as they're kept clean. Throw in some dust and carpet lint and they'll start grinding down down just like any other transmission. Keep them clean and they won't give any problems, even if the wheels are cantilevered directly onto the output shafts (assuming the wheel is as close to the transmission as practical)
- After coming off of the field: a cold motor is burned out; a warm motor is good; a hot Window Motor makes a very unhappy student or mentor.

[Dave Scheck]

Originally Posted by JVN

I discussed some of my experiences at this wonderful event here:
http://jvengineering.blogspot.com/20...on-part-2.html

As to this comment in John's blog

Wildstang's itsy bitsy robot pen -- Raul, I don't think the swerve was important in this application.

Here's a picture that shows the *enormous* amount of carpet that we had to drive on. So enormous in fact that I don't think we could have turned 90 degrees if we wanted to

http://wildstangpictures.shutterfly.com/59

Feel free to browse the entire gallery here

[Al Skierkiewicz]

There a few pictures posted on the Mythbuster's website. Check one of our student's getting his shirt autographed by Kari Byron.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/my...l-expo-09.html

[RoboMom]

The organizer Larry Bock is asking for photos.

PM me if you need his email.