Greetings! I am a mentor of Team #1287 Aluminum Assault and an annual attendee of the Palmetto Regional in South Carolina. Our school, the Academy for the Arts, Science, and Technology is located about 10 minutes from the event located at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center.
This regional begins at Week “0.5” this year instead of Week 1. FIRST made a blog post about this change Here. This is the only FRC event happening this week and it starts almost immediately after bag and tag day! There are 66 teams registered for this event, so it will be quite a busy event. Make sure to tune in to the live broadcast from FIRST to see the game in action at http://www.myrtlebeachfirstrobotics.com/!
We will be providing our own practice field for the regional in addition to the practice field provided by FIRST, giving us two practice fields to provide teams with at the regional this year. We are also providing student volunteers to help with operation of the event. If you have LabVIEW programming troubles at the event and can’t get to one of the FIRST assistants, flag down one of the members of our team and our student programmers or I will do our best to assist you.
If you have any questions about the event or the surrounding area let us know and we will do our best to answer your questions. Best of luck to everyone attending the event!
Do we know yet if teams will be able to do pit setup on the Wednesday night during load in? Or will we have to wait until the Thursday like previous years?
Hopefully Wednesday night. They let teams do a little last year and it was great.* I have to commend the Palmetto regional staff for allowing teams to just plug in their batteries. It might seem simple but it is one of the best things and we’ve been told “no you can’t plug in your batteries” during load-in more than once at the other events we’ve attended.
I have been told that this year we are permitted to set up our pit on load in day. As most of you might remember, last year we were prohibited from setting up our pits during load in.
The South Carolina regional director told us South Carolina teams at Kickoff and I’m sure it will be info included in future email blasts about Palmetto that he will allow the 5 member teams one Wenesday night and Thursday morning to setup pits.
As for 4901 we are looking forward to the competition with what could be our most dominate and competitive robot to come from our shop.
We’re Team 1369 Minotaur out of Middleton Magnet High School, Tampa, FLand excited to venture to the Palmetto state. We have our heavy jackets, wool hats & gloves packed :yikes:
We are looking for a recommendation on a good restaurant for a team dinner on Friday night. A buffet style would be best as we’ll be 55+ people and our kids love buffets. We’re staying at La Quinta on Kings Highway so anything relatively close to Arena or hotel would be great.
FRC 1296, the Full Metal Jackets, are making our way to beautiful SC from Dallas. Restaurant recommendations for team meals would be great!
I grew up in the mountains of NC and we are sponsored by a company in Virginia, it will be nice to do a east coast event. We look forward to meeting all the local teams.
The closest buffet I can recommend (to Team 1369) is The Original Benjamin’s Calabash Seafood. The main theme is seafood but they have a ton of menu items to choose from for those who aren’t seafood fans.
Another buffet near Broadway at the Beach is Captain George’s. It’s another seafood theme but it also has a good pot roast on the menu.
An inexpensive, BBQ themed buffet is Simply Southern Smokehouse. It’s close to the location of the Palmetto Regional and you can’t go wrong with BBQ!
I am a mentor from 2386. 2386 along with 4 other teams from the Halton District School Board in Ontario, Canada will be convoying down to Myrtle Beach! We are looking forward to this as for some of our teams we will be new to the regional!
Good luck to all… and we promise not to bring snow like we did last year to Arkansas!
Looking forward to having Canada at the event again! I’m curious, how do you guys plan to travel to the event this year with the event happening so close to bag-'n-tag day? Will your teams finish early?
Our teams are planning for a Saturday February 20th Bag 'n Tag as we will be travelling via Coach Buses leaving the schools Monday morning. We are pulling extra hours and also currently have exam week right now for the students so the shops are open for students to come and go after their exams. Today we are working later than normal for a Saturday too. It’s going to be tough this year but we are determined!
For those asking about restaurants, one word of caution from our experiences the last few years. February is the off season in Myrtle Beach. The tourists have not yet arrived. Many of the restaurants close earlier than they do later in the season.
If you go out Thursday night after the pits close (I think that is 8 pm), you may find that some restaurants are already starting to close down. It is definitely a good idea to call ahead and see how late they are open.
3824 is looking forward to seeing everyone and storming some castles together.
Team 343 Metal in Motion is super excited about the Palmetto Regional this year. We look forward to welcoming all of those teams coming from out of state. We are also looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones. Welcome to the rookies coming to the Palmetto. We too are able and willing to help anyone having trouble with LabView.
