Who is excited? 
Hoping that we dont have the communications issue that plagued us the entire time at Traverse City. From there we just have to work out all of the bugs or see what we can do this week in our 6 hours of practice! What I am looking forward to the most is see how far we can actually kick it in a match. My guess is we might be able to kick from wall to wall in the air if we really try.
Good Luck to all other teams!
Hopefully you guys can drive down there on thursday to try and get your wireless working with the DET field 
And if you can kick that far, I would say you would make a pretty good alliance partner!
548 is Excited! And Iām looking forward to seeing the Feds (who I have been able to penalize already this year :yikes: ) and the Armadillos (who not only have I not seen this year but the fire ants who eat baby armadillos have run them out of Texas so I donāt even get to see real ones anymore 
).
Look for the hat in the queing line (since I am not reffing this one) and I will try to get you a prime position to rest through the field faults! :yikes:
This event list looks similar to the one I saw at Kettering. Hopefully its just as exciting. I just want to make one request. Teams stop shooting soccer balls at my face!! 
Iām pumped! Hopefully our robot will be operational too, unlike at Traverse City. The drivetrain bugs should all be fixed now, and we were swerving happily around the shop last night. Iām really looking forward to seeing if weāll actually have an opportunity to hang during a match
As always, Iāll be around somewhere if you look hard enough, so please come find me if you get the chance! Shortish dark brown french braids, bright yellow bandanna covering them, bright yellow eyeshadow, and an aluminum tetris T-block dangling from my neck (you get a physical description, you see, because I tend to be everywhere at once during competitionsā¦try the pit first).
Good luck everyone!
Well we somehow worked for about half of our second to last match and kicked the ball two zones without a full windup twice. Now we just have to find out why we lose comm so we run full matches. Our plan is to get down there and inspected ASAP so we can get onto the field to see if we are going to have issues or not.
Thatās exactly what I thought! Although if you look closely only 11 *awesome *teams (:P) are attending both. I donāt mind though, I like seeing new teams 
Although it doesnāt really matter, what I really find interesting is that out of the 10 lowest numbered teams that attended Kettering, 7 of them are going to Detroit.
Another thing is the lack of teams in the 2000ās that are attending Detroit as compared to Kettering.
Just a few things that I noticed while looking at both team lists side to side.
Iām not a programmer/electrical kind of person, but you might want to double-check (because Iām sure youāve checked it a lot already) to make sure your radio is functioning properly, especially if youāre using the same one from last year. Our radio from last year was having problems with losing comm any time it was jostled, which we figured out in week 4, so we ordered a replacement and havenāt had any comm problems since.
What Karibou said. Also, be sure your radio isnāt mounted to something too rigid. There are some parts in the radio that donāt stand up well to shock loads. We try to mount it to something that flexes so even when our robot gets a jolt, the jolt isnāt directly translated into the radio. This year we have our radio mounted to one of our 1/8" sheets of lexan. There were a couple of teams last year that were breaking radios frequently. We convinced one of them to change the radio mounting and that solved the problem.
Without getting into to much details we tried a lot of things up at Traverse City (including loaned radios and more), there are some other threads that discussed if full. The programming guys think it might be the USB power issue so getting something together for that. We will be down there Thursday from 4-10 so plenty of time to test.
Thanks for the input guys. Feel free to stop on by and check us out, hopefully fully working. Cant wait, should be a great competitive event!
In case you did not get the update, they changed the start time on Thursday from 4pm to 6pm.
Today was a great day.
I want to give a special thanks from team 2620 to team 51 (The new Chief Delphi team)
On match 46 they broke our loosing streak of like 4. It was ridiculous. We were in 2nd place for a while then dropped, and dropped and dropped to like 14th place, our last match brought us to 8th. Then the final matches after that brought us to 10th. Havnt checked since we left today. I think tomorrow will decide it. We need to get our timing right for the autonomous in the zone with 3 balls then our bot will be pretty amazing. I made 6 points today and i didnt touch the field >.< Autonomous is awesome ;D
Anyways, so those teams that are there, youll see us on the practice field in the morning probably working out our timing.
EDIT:: Also, team 51 members, where did you guys get another cRio from? o.0 you went threw 2 today didnt you? Frying 2 i mean. Or just 1? And thats odd, i havnt heaerd of people drying there cRio unless it was wired incorrectly. The power that is.
We only ābrokeā one cRIO today. We got a loner, but we couldnāt get that one to image. Therefore, we needed to get a 2nd one. It just took us about an hour to do the fix since the first loner didnāt work.
(BTW: we got the loners from spare parts or pit admin. Iām not sure which. Our young guns did a good job of tracking down the spares - and fixing the robot. Iām really proud of our students today. They worked amazingly, especially considering the pressure. I hate that we missed a match, but I KNOW that the students that were involved in the fix learned a lot of great lessons that this competition can teach.)
Good luck to you guys tomorrow. Weāll see you around.
We also got a spare CRio from the spare parts guys. Usually you just have to sign your life away if you want to get one to make sure you return it, but they only have so many.
Also pumped that we have been working. Had a 40 foot bomb of a kick at one point. Kept it toned down for the most part because there is no need to kick it that far. Who know maybe at some point ā¦
Well, you dont learn anything from a good situation. Its the bad ones where you learn the most.
To quote another mentor āHoly Red Card, Batman!ā I counted 7 red cards today. 5 of which were in the eliminations.
But more importantly the teams were playing some real competitive Breakaway!
There is no GM Industrial Design Award winner at http://www2.usfirst.org/2010comp/events/DT/awards.html, does anyone know who won?
Iād venture to guess 67 won that award The Autodesk awards arenāt given out at districts, I think the two got flipped.
67 did win the design awardā¦