So What is your team doing from now till Kickoff

[Dave_222]

ohhhh you guys are a tuff croud I would hate to be on the bad side of your team

[nick-190]

We are just starting our Mini-First program which gets newbees and rookies excited and give them an idea on whaet First is about. Also we are mentoring 4 Lego League teams, prototyping differnet things that we might use, demoing our 2001 robot to various school and groups and just keeping organzed for kickoff.

[Patrick Wang]

Are you getting a machine shop set up on your school campus or is it off campus?

I'm also curious as to how you obtained the machines. That is a large capital investment/donation for anyone to make if you're getting a full shop.

[Jeff Waegelin]

Well, some schools (like ours) have, or had as the case may be for us, a metal shop program in our school. A fully equipped metal shop has a lot of the tools that you need to run a competition machine shop. It may not be of the same caliber as a professional machine shop, but that is not always necessary. In our case, we have a milling machine, lathe, drill press, grinder, welder, and plasma cutter. We have built some great robots out of that. It suits our needs perfectly.

[Dan 550]

Well, we at 550 are preparing for battle as such: re-thinking our motion control system (with a lot of help from Joe Johnson), designing the most excellent T-shirts of all time, getting together a mascot outfit (Everyone at Rutgers better look out for the knight in real, shining armor.), and tryin to get an understanding of pBasic, AutoDesk animation, and Ultra-SlowCAD 4000. Actually, our CAD program is decent; we just don't have quite the understanding of it that we'd like to have. It's just a very, very delicate program that is, um, quite complicated, as it can't do polygons all by itself. But, anyway, wer're not fundraising, cause we have enough already.

[Tom Fairchild]

Okay, okay - I admit it. Our team is a little spoiled when it comes to machine shops. We're located less than 5 minutes away from the NASA Langley Research Center, which has an advanced machining center. Last year they got a brand new 5 axis milling machine - basically it can mill anything. At the meeting today, a mentor was telling me about some new machine that they just got that uses a water pick to cut through aluminum EXTREMELY quickly - 15 min. for a part that took a CNC around 3 to 4 hours. Can't wait to get my hands on that one!!

~Tom~, who loves playing with machine tools.

[Patrick Wang]

You can never be done fundraising.

It goes on 24-7. All year, every day. The job is never over.

If you truly have too much money, you can funnel some our way

You can never have too much money.

[Shelley_delphi chick]

Oue team has been busy since school started getting ready for the upcoming season. Like everyone else we are trying to get corperate support from our comunnity, fundraise as much as we can, and cleaning up shop. We have both a machine and wood shop at our use at our high school. We took inventory, restocked alot of things, and cleaned from last years season. Promotions team has been busy designing our uniforms, A-V team (which I am the captain of) has been taking the chairman's award rules and running with them, and the Build team has been working and building parts for the war wagon and also the pit area.

That is what my team has been doing to get ready for the upcoming FIRST robotics season.


Hope Everyone has a great season!!

shelley

[OtakuRob]

We here at 237 are basically just getting organized as of right now.. There have been some problems with various scholastic entities that needed to be settled, but while we do have the time together, we're all planning out the 6-weeks and training newbies with good old fashioned pen and paper.. For now, at least.. If anyone from 237 wants to add, they can feel free..

[Shelley_delphi chick]

It sounds like everyone is gearing up for the new season!! I hope all the rookies out there are getting all the mentoring they need and I hope the returning teams find a team near by and mentor them.......


HAVE A GREAT YEAR EVERYONE!!

Shelley

[mnkysp6353]

Our machine shop is almost finished. We are getting our mill and lathe on thursday. We also just got sponsored by Hughes who hopefully will let us use there Laser Cnc.