Well, tommorow’s decision day…
Wish me luck!
Good luck!!! 
Well, our teacher kinda worked around the whole voting concept and decided to just do whatever he wanted to do- so we’re joining FIRST!
YAY!
Welcome!
Wetzel
congratulations, and welcome to the organization…enjoy these last 54 days of “normal” life. 
Enjoy?
I’ll be happy when I’m welding at 2 AM and forcing people to work when they don’t want to >: )
It sounds like you are ready for the FIRST season to get here, just like most of the other FIRST participants. And congratulations again!
Anyone who stays up until 1am or later to work on the robot has to be enjoying themselves, and would not be there unless they wanted to. You won’t end up forcing many people to work because they’ll already be there doing the work without being asked. Have a great season!
_Alex
Glad to hear you guys made your decision. Welcome to FIRST! Oh, and make sure you buy plenty of Mountain Dew (if you guys have it over there). It’s definitely the FIRSTer’s drink of choice at 2 AM. If you don’t, just substitute any beverage of high caffeine and sugar content. You’re gonna need it…
We have red bull 
Hi,
I suggest that you go for it. Our first year 2003, we didn’t get the go-ahead until 12/10/02. We had our first team meeting the day after the kickoff. None of us new any programming or pneumatics. We had one teacher and one mentor. You have to start somewhere. The students that stuck with it really got a lot out of the program.
I’ve never heard of that so we probably don’t have it, not that it really matters, we can always make a collar that zapps you whenever your head goes down (do they have those things for speely drivers?)
By the way, I see there is a lot of 3d modeling involved in robot design, would 3dsmax7 be good for this?
Or should I start learning Inventor? 
Inventor is the CAD program, 3dsMax is the animation program.
If you are concerned about the design, learn Inventor.
That said, you don’t have to model any of your robot. Some teams don’t, some do. The teams that do tend to do better, but there are other factors involved. Such as the teams that are organized enough to CAD their robot, tend to be more organized overall. Other teams model only parts of their robot. 116 has modeled parts, but the only fully CADed part that I’ve ever seen get done is the gearbox, which because of the complexity is a very good idea. The rest have been drawn up, but not as an overall robot.
With Inventor, there is also the benifit of being able to share your CAD files with everyone here.
Wetzel
Why would I want to make an animation? (besides entertainment)
And also, know any good Inventor9 tutorial sites?
FIRST isn’t just a robot building competition. It is a person building experiance, that takes the shape of a robot building competition. Included in this is business planning to organize your team and raise funding, team spirit, learning how to get along with someone after spending far too much time with them in a high stress environment and much more.
Part of this is shown in the awards FIRST give outs, one of which is the animation award. Teams create a 30 second animation, typicaly the goal has been along the lines of ‘show the spirit of FIRST’.
These are the awards from last year. They may or may not change this year. The animation award is the Autodesk Visulization Award. My team has won it at a regional level for the past two years, thanks to the hard work of Lev to get the animation team organized, and Cohen for continuing that hard work.
Wetzel
Hmmm…
What’s included in the animation?
Would it need to be done in the 6 weeks of building?
30 second animation my friend.
According to the 2004 FRC Manual, Awards section, page 1:
“Presented by Autodesk, Inc., this award recognizes excellence in student animation that clearly and creatively
illustrates the spirit of the FIRST Robotics Competition. Autodesk will award excellence in content, creativity, and mastery of multimedia”.
And on the same section, page 16:
The Award recognizes 30-seconds of student animation that clearly and creatively illustrates what FIRST
means to your team, meets entry requirements, and is judged to have the highest score.
So basically, you have to show how FIRST inspired the team. As usual with FIRST, it’s not just about the robots, so many winning animations don’t even picture the team’s robot.
It used to be that the animation could be submitted a few weeks after the building period, but last year it was changed. Will it remain the same for next year? Wait 'till January 8th - you gonna love it
We’re supossed to design and build a cardboard robot for last years competition to develope designing skills and whatnot, so we were told to watch last years NASA webcasts, which happen to be very long…
Why does this blue-haired freak keep air-kicking the teams?! ACK!
Anyway, I was thinking about making a shepherd robot that would be fast and have wings that would deplot to kinda plow the balls to the human players, and push around goals and robots- what do you think? any major design flaws? (keep in mind it’s just a cardboard practice robot, no need for details)