Southwest Robotics Blog

So. . . what is the Judge's Award?

2009-04-19T21:48:00.002-05:00

"During the course of the competition, the judging panel may encounter a team whose unique efforts, performance, or dynamics merit recognition, yet doesn't fit into any of the existing categories. The judges want to give a special award today to one such team...

They display unusual strength in 3 areas:

1) Thorough strategy planning

2) Exceptionally strong system design

3) True team spirit with a positive refreshing attitude

They are from the "south" but not as far as you think.

Don't get close, you may get burned. They are really "out of sight."

The Judges Award is presented to Team #2129, UltraViolet, from Southwest High School."

~MN North Star Regional Judging Panel

Day #3 of the MN North Star Regional

2009-04-04T21:16:00.003-05:00

We won both of our remaining qualifying matches today and were selected as an alliance partner, but we lost in the quarter finals.

Southwest made a good showing at the regional. We won 5 out of 7 qualifying matches, our best showing in 3 seasons, and ended with a ranking of #12 out of the 51 teams attending. Breakdowns were minor and game playing good. In the end, the dumpster designs our performed the shooter designs. However, our team did win the JUDGES AWARD for refreshing team spirit and innovative design, and with it two trophies. Congratulations to everyone!

Day #2 of the MN North Star Regional

2009-04-03T17:21:00.003-05:00

Today we won 3 of our 5 matches. The robot was fully functioning for all matches except once when the batter wire came unplugged and we lost power; we finished today in 18th place (out of 51 teams). Tomorrow we have 2 more qualification matches and then the finals begin.

At the award ceremony today we won the "Judge's Award" for innovative design and refreshing team spirit, and with it 2 trophies!

Day #1 of the MN North Star Regional

2009-04-02T20:57:00.003-05:00

Today we added our revamped electronics and flew through inspection, just making it within the 28x38 inch limit. The new turret system is working well and the robot vision is successfully tracking trailers!

Feed Fixed

2009-01-20T22:45:00.000-06:00

You may or may not have noticed that our feed was throwing weird errors for the last few days. If you did, those errors should all have gone away. There was a glitch on FeedBurner's part (specifically, the half-or-so of FeedBurner that runs on Google's servers) that took a little while to track down.

Apparently it was (and likely still is) pretty wide-spread, affecting many publishers. The problem started after I migrated my FeedBurner account (which contains this site's feed as well as my own blog's) to Google's servers. The nitty-gritty technical details are (more or less) spelled out on my personal blog in a very rough, quick post, if you're so inclined to read them.

Website Updated

2009-01-13T19:45:00.000-06:00

I just pushed our development site to the production area. That means you'll see a new and improved site when you go to swrobotics.com.

Among the new features are email addresses on the Members page (obfuscated to keep spambots from picking them up), updated pictures, and a search box. The search box has been reported to have some problems with its appearance, but I haven't been able to fix them because they don't happen for me. (If you see the problem -- a cut-off box or button -- or you know something about CSS and might be able to help, please email me at daniel.w [at] swrobotics [dot] com.)

There are more improvements in the works, and now I have a second developer to help me. Hopefully things will start flying out, at least after we're all done with build season.

2009 FRC Game - Lunacy!

2009-01-03T13:33:00.003-06:00

The game has been released! 6 robots compete on a slick surface with 1/6 the usual friction, similar to rover conditions on the windswept planes of the moon. The 3 robots on your team each drag trailers and try shoot or dunk "Moon Rocks" into the opposing alliance's trailers. Download the Game Animation for an overview and read the Game Manual for the nitty-gritty.

Update (01/11) by Voyagerfan5761: As pointed out by an anonymous commenter, the game is called "Lunacy". Not "Lundacy". Fixed.

2009 Control System

2008-12-13T17:04:00.005-06:00

Southwest was able to get a head start with the new FRC control system last Wednesday and download a program to the cRIO for the first time. Hopefully we'll have the old robot with new control system tracking someone's T-shirt by this Tuesday.

MN Splash!

2008-12-06T14:58:00.003-06:00

Today was the annual MN Splash event at the U of M Anderson Hall. Team 2129 had two speakers, Rick Riddle for electronics and myself for LabVIEW. This is gearing up to be a great season, with 20 new MN teams and 2 MN regionals!

Copies of the presentations will be avaiable from the MN Regional website.

Eagan Mini-Regional

2008-11-17T09:39:00.002-06:00

Our team had a great time at the Eagan Mini-Regional, we were able to demo The Chariot and Roller and check out everyone's designs. We made it to the semi-finals and ended in 7th place, narrowly missing the top 6 for finals.

Demo at Schedule PickUp

2008-08-28T20:05:00.002-05:00

Today's demo went well, we had the Lego robot following lines and gave fliers to interested students.

The Roller was up and running for about 2 minutes before one sprocket started sliding. Then it went in circles for 2 hours before the other sprocket started sliding. To summarize: we need to buy better - and faster - sprockets (or thread some holes).

Southwest Robotics on MAKE TV!

2008-08-13T11:12:00.002-05:00

We're gonna be on the intros for a new show on TPT called MAKE TV! You can see a preview at http://www.makezine.com/tv/ (needs QuickTime).

An exciting month!

2008-07-31T12:09:00.000-05:00

Hey everybody. This is Sam again. Sorry we haven't updated you on our summer awesome-ness, so this is what has happened recently:

Saturday, July 19th, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Peter Agre came to our robotics meeting at the Bakken! He knows Earl Bakken, and decided to come and visit the museum. The people in charge at the Bakken had little notice of his visit. He saw us working in the Bakken's workshop, and decided to visit. There also was a photographer for the Bakken's newsletter. He took many pictures of our team and our robot. Mr. Agre, being the cool person that he is, let the robot chase him around the room. That was funny! We were very excited to have Mr. Agre visit us so unexpectedly.

On the 22nd, we had a mini-tournament at Eagan High School. There were only 5 teams including us, so it was a very small event. It was only for fun, and instead of 3 teams on 3, we had 2 on 2. It was fun to see the other teams again, and to hang out. They fed us pizza, which made the day even better.

Now, we are preparing our robot for exposition at the Minnesota State Fair. We have to get the robot there by the 12th of August, so that leaves little time for tweaking and improving the designs and programs. However, I am confident that we will be ready for our grand public debut! We are also working on the Roller, our summer robot from last year. Our CAD person is modeling a standard base design to help us expedite the design process for the the build season.

That's about all that has happened in our robotics team for the last month, other than mundane building, improving and programming. Thanks for reading!

Video Page!

2008-06-20T09:58:00.002-05:00

Good news! Our website now has a video page! At the moment it's reasonably rough-cut, since all I had to go on was a list of videos. They're in reverse chronological order (or as near to it as I could determine), so new stuff will always be on top.

I know, I'm terribly late with this announcement. I should have been able to post it weeks ago. But such is life: Things take a lot longer than you expect, especially when other things interfere.

So go ahead and watch some videos of our robot. I didn't get too much material from this year, but last year has a full complement of videos from the build season and competition. Enjoy! I'll see about getting this year's videos up by September or October.

"We Make Robots!"

2008-06-19T13:44:00.003-05:00

TPT is partnering with MAKE Magazine to create a new series about what people make. They were filming at The Bakken; after a hectic 45 minutes to get the robot's grabber working again we had the oppurtunity to say "We Make Robots!" 43 times in the boiling sun while the robot picked up the trackball (and dropped it behind itself).

The show is sheduled to start in January, and we might be part of the intro clips for every show!

Move to the Bakken

2008-06-05T17:15:00.005-05:00

We managed to stay ahead of the rain today when we moved into The Bakken. Special thanks to Tammy and her parents who drove.

The Bakken has an excellent workspace and experienced mentors; working with them this summer will be a great opportunity. Our first meeting to familiarize everyone with the workspace and tools will be next Saturday.

Partnership with The Bakken?

2008-05-25T10:24:00.004-05:00

"The Bakken is a center for education and learning that furthers the understanding of the history, cultural context, and applications of electricity and magnetism in the life sciences and their benefits to contemporary society."

This summer our team won't have access to the Southwest Wood Shop, but we might be able to work at the nearby workshop of The Bakken Museum and Library. This is an exciting new opportunity for our team.

Site Enhancements In Progress

2008-05-13T21:29:00.000-05:00

This blog has been pretty quiet for a long while, but we're not asleep. We're still having regular meetings, planning things for next season, and learning new tools (example) that will hopefully help us build a better robot for the next regional.

More specifically to me and my job, though, there's been some development going on with the website. I'm working on some enhancements to existing features, cleaning up the code a bit, and streamlining a couple things behind the scenes. It's nothing too major -- and given the amount of development time I have it's surprising to me that I even got that much done -- but it's progress nonetheless.

Before launching everything, I have to test on our new server. And before that, I'd like to figure out a video page, which has been on hold for a long time. (Come to think of it, I'll probably get another email about it now, having reminded the rest of the team about that shortcoming.)

See, our website downtime last month prodded Mark to commission a dedicated server, built and installed by one of our mentors (Tim F.), where we can hopefully do more things, more easier and more better (common expression). There's a convenient database system installed now, along with a Web-based server administration panel that I can actually access because it's not a shared hosting account. So there's stuff to do there, as well.

Combined with being busy for much of the summer, I have a lot to do. My goal is to finish everything, tie up the loose ends, and launch on the new server before I leave home at the end of June. So there's stuff coming; it's just going to take several weeks. But it's in the pipeline, as they say.

Meanwhile, I'll see if I can get other people to post more frequent updates so this blog serves its intended purpose.

Videos

2008-05-07T17:45:00.004-05:00

One of our teammates, Malcolm, made a couple of videos about our team and posted them on YouTube:

2008 Season, and
A Tribute to Lisa, our former team coordinator.

Thank you so much, Malcolm! You truly did a great job.

Blog Issues Resolved

2008-05-05T21:29:00.001-05:00

Sometime around April 29, this blog's DNS entry was mysteriously messed up and the site became inaccessible. It's working again now; sorry for any inconvenience. A simple email to our server admin (no, not me; I just make the site) got it fixed a couple days ago.

The main site was unaffected by the problem.

Website Downtime

2008-04-09T21:29:00.001-05:00

Our website is currently returning 404 Not Found errors for everything. Mark and I apologize for the downtime - our hosting account is gratis from a team member's relative, and it hasn't been kept up apparently. We should be back to normal in a few days.

Update (08:24 04/11): We're back in business! Sorry for any inconvenience.

Congratulations to The Green Machine

2008-04-04T13:07:00.002-05:00

Last weekend, The Green Machine, the team who started us, competed in the Minnesota FRC regional at the U of M. They won the Chairman's Award! For this, they deserve major congratulations. Now they are going on to the National Competition in Atlanta, GA for the third year in a row. Good luck Green Machine!

Milwaukee Competition

2008-03-16T21:06:00.001-05:00

The 3-day Milwaukee competition ended last Saturday afternoon. Among the winners was Washburn Robotics, a team that we mentored. We did not make it to the final round - we were not picked by one of the top 8 teams. I think that we had a very good robot. What we didn't have was a good strategy - we lost a few games from penalties and poor decisions. We ended the first day of competition winning only one game and losing four. Something we hadn't expected was interference to our IR remote from lap-counters - we had to reprogram the robot's hybrid mode.

On Saturday, we came prepared. A little more planning went a long way. We performed well and won 2 games out of 3. In the end, these competitions involve a lot of luck - a box with wheels and an excellent driver can win just as easily as a durable, sophisticated robot. This system gives rookie teams a chance and is in the spirit of gracious professionalism. It places emphasis not on winning, but on growing as a team and learning together. And that is what we did.

Milwaukee!!!

2008-03-12T22:21:00.003-05:00

It was an adventurous bus ride. The most important question, of course: which fast food restaurant? The line was long at Subway, but a scary poster of Jerod gave Culver's butterburgers a fighting chance.

We got to the hotel around 9:30. Tonight sleep. . . tomorrow competition!

We're getting closer!!!

2008-03-02T21:21:00.005-06:00

I know I haven't blogged lately, so here's what's going on now. The Milwaukee tournament starts tomorrow!!! We are very excited for the opening ceremony tomorrow morning. Can't wait to see the other robots!!!