FRC Team 449 is starting a new Chesapeake offseason event called “Bunnybots”. Modeled after FRC Team 1540’s popular event of the same name, Bunnybots consists of a separate, three-and-a-half month long “build season” in the fall. Bunnybots is an excellent opportunity for your team’s new members to gain the skills needed to build an FRC-style robot and to show off their work and have some fun with an offseason event designed just for them. The Chesapeake Bunnybots challenge will be released on our website on September 1st, the registration deadline is October 1st, and the competition will be held on December 15th. Visit https://robot.mbhs.edu/bunnybots/ for more details and to register.
I’m really glad to hear that this is finally happening. Bunnybots is an incredible opportunity for learning, and a ton of fun. It’s about time that teams outside the PNW get to experience it.
I want to add to Bryce’s comments.
Our team has competed in Bunnybot here in Oregon for a number of years. It has been very useful for training new members and testing new systems. This type of event is pretty low pressure (hey it is still a competition) and you can learn a large amount from your mistakes.
I would heavily suggest teams that have an opportunity to attend one of these competitions do so.
Enjoy!
We’re delighted help to get another Bunnybots rolling. It really is a great chance to get new members up to speed and bonded with the team before build season starts. We’ve found it all but eliminates the “melt” our team used to see between signups in late September and build season January. Now there’s something engaging for new membera to do in the fall. Thanks to 449 for bringing this to a new part of the country!
Bunnybots is designed to be easy to host. If teams in other areas would like to explore hosting their own Bunnybots, PM me.
Rules for this year’s Bunnybots will be rolled out Sept 1st at www.team1540.org/bunnybots.
We have the first version of our rules up on http://robot.mbhs.edu/bunnybots! Note that these rules differ slightly from the PNW ones, mostly because we’re trying to use Offseason FMS.
Passed it on to our team waiting to see what their plan is
Since the event is confirmed to happen with 9(!!!) total robots signed up so far, we are extending the deadline for registration to October 31st. If your team is still thinking about bunnybots, we’d love to have more teams!
We have done BunnyBots for 3 years and love it. We are a rural team about 2 hours away from anywhere. Multi-day FRC events cost us about $3000 for transportation, food and housing, plus about $5000 for the event. BunnyBots is a one day event, thus no overnite expenses. The entire event costs us less than $500.
Our school does not have programming, CAD or mechanical arts, so we try to learn about robotics by building robots. We have entered BunnyBots that are as simple as a AM14U3 kit with joysticks. Sometimes we are clever enough to add actuators and simple machine vision.
BunnyBots is an inexpensive and fun way to learn about FRC robotics.
MAR or any region would benefit from this, unfortunately I am not the guy to make it happen. Thanks for bringing it to the east coast and hopefully I will make it down to see the competition (I assume it will be open to the public).
We’re working on a couple of bots for this, having a whole new competition to take rookies through, lower registration cost, and having more time to prep were all really appealing to us.