[BB] The view from 30,000 feet

[alectronic]

"Good Afternoon Teams,

I just got back from flying to Pennsylvania with Dean to look for additional FRC corporate support. During the plane ride (yes, Dean was the pilot) I thought of a few more things to tell you this week.

Safety animations are due this coming Monday, Dec 6th. Animations must be submitted by your team’s student award submitter in STIMS The winning animation will be shown during the live Kickoff broadcast on January 8th. I’m looking forward to seeing your submissions.

NASA grants are posted

FIRST received the $200K grant from AMEX. Thank you to all of you who voted!

Are you planning to have a week zero event? (For those of you who don’t know, a week zero event is when teams gather together the weekend before robot ship day to try out their robots in a competition like atmosphere.) We want to know who’s hosting week zero events (even the small ones). Please drop me a line at FRCTeams@usfirst.org and let me know.

Please note the version of Workbench provided in the FRC Kit of Parts (2009 – 2011) is not certified for use on 64-bit Windows operating systems. Please use the C/C++ section of the FIRST Forums for questions about this issue

If you haven’t visited Think Tank lately, you might want to check it out. WPI has just finished a number of upgrades and the site is bigger and better than ever. There’s a lot of information for teams by team about how to have a successful season.

With the extraordinary number of rookie teams this year (386 at last count) we’re looking for successful veteran teams to share their areas of expertise by contributing articles to the website. Does your team know how to use encoders? Have a fool proof method for debugging? Build custom driver station hardware? Submit an article to Think Tank and share your talent with the FRC community.

We’re also looking for a few good mentors to act as approvers for the Think Tank website. If you know of someone highly respected for their knowledge who consistently provides FRC teams with impeccable advice, please send their name and area of expertise to FRCTeams@usfirst.org. People with multiple nominations will be invited to join the elite team of approvers at Think Tank.

Watch Dean, Former VP, Al Gore and Sec. of Education, A. Duncan and the MythBusters’ team talk about FIRST during the Global Online Town Hall sponsored by Time Warner Cable.

National Robotics Week is looking for slogan suggestions to make more people aware of this annual celebration of technology. More details can be found here.

36 days to Kickoff
See you then!

Posted by Bill at 12:25pm