TeamPrion

Competition Report

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 22:59:00 +0000

We finished the FRC season last weekend. We experienced some difficulty on the robot on both the mechanical and programming sides, but we improved all weekend long. Although we were not ranked very well, we kept our spirit up and won the Rookie Inspiration Award. The tournament gave us a variety of lessons and ideas for next year. The marketing department has some ideas, we realized the importance of scouting, and both the mechanical and programming departments learned some very important lessons about changing the robot. On Saturday, we were able to watch the elimination matches, and were very happy to hear that our club president, David Pudlo, was selected as a Dean’s List Finalist.

What's New

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:59:00 +0000

It's been a while since the last update, so here's a quick recap of what's happened:
1) WE ATTENDED THE FRC Competition. And we won the Rookie Inspiration Award. (a more full report will be posted soon.)
2) We took lots of picture and video - check it out at teamprion.com. there's lots of new pictures, video of the competition, and a highlights video that sums up the whole year.
3) We have a Facebook Fan Page - become a fan and connect at facebook.com. In fact, you can see this update and all our others from the fan page (including twitter updates.)

Quick Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:40:00 +0000

There haven't been any updates recently, mostly because not much has happened. We have shipped the robot so there isn't much to do. The mechanical team has been working on a few spare parts for the robot. The marketing team is planning buttons and other marketing materials for the competition. We are looking forward to the competition coming up in two weeks, and will update whenever there is more news.

Week 7 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:10:00 +0000

We successfully finished the robot on Monday so it could get shipped on Tuesday. The latter part of this week was spent focused on FTC - we basically had to start building the robot from scratch, after it got disassembled while we were working on FRC. So we were able to build the FTC robot in 3 days - Wednesday - Friday, and had it ready to compete on Saturday.
Saturday's competition was laden with technical difficulties. Finding that we could not use enough power to pick up balls and shoot them, we opted not to be able to pick up balls, instead focusing on shooting the balls at the off field baskets that are available during the end game, and pushing the ball release lever to get 5 points.
We had a little bit of success, but found small but persistent problems plaguing us all day. Overall, our alliance won 2 out of 5 matches, and we placed 16 out of 30 teams. Unfortunately, that meant that we weren't able to advance to the finals.
We're still happy with the robots performance - considering that we had 3 days to build and pretty much no time to debug, and enjoyed the competition. We look forward to more success with FRC.

Week 6 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 23:18:00 +0000

This week was spent trying to ready the robot for the ship date. The mechanical, programming, and marketing teams all spent the week trying to get things ready for upcoming deadlines. The robot is mostly ready but both mechanical and programming have little bits of debugging to do before the robot is finished. On Thursday the website went live.

Week 5 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:58:00 +0000

Progress on the robot continues to go well. The marketing team met today to tie-dye our t-shirts, which arrived yesterday. Much progress has been made on the robot this week, and most of the features are ready, except the kicker. Earlier in the week the mechanical department met at ABCO Automation to make some of the parts that we needed. The electronics board has been mounted, the motors work, and the programming department is finishing debugging their code and making the robot ready to run. Also we created a Twitter account, (twitter.com/teamprion), so we can post smaller, more frequent updates on this page as well as at Twitter.

Week 4 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:57:00 +0000

We put the wheels on the robot this week and were able to do our first successful driving test this week. We ordered some more parts that we needed. This week we also got a full size model of the goal to use for practice. Also, we meet with Dr. Sue Polinsky of Tech Triad, who helped with the design of our website.

Week 3 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:13:00 +0000

This week's most notable achievement was that we have shifted our focus from design to actual implementation of our design. We began working on the robot, and, while still in the early stages, progress goes well. I.T. Worx, our neighbor at out storefront location, gave us free internet access starting this week. We began programming in Solid Works this week, as well.

Week 2 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:32:00 +0000

This week we continued working mostly on strategy and design, and are almost ready to really start working on the robot. We have moved our regular meetings from Grimsley to an off site location in a vacant storefront that we have generously been allowed to use. We have full size models of the bumps used in the game that will allow us to test the robot. This week we also designed our Prion logo.

Week 1 Update

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:56:00 +0000

This week we worked mostly on strategy and the design of the robot. We are still meeting at Grimsley High School, though we are trying to find somewhere else to meet that has better facilities for building the robot.

Kickoff!!

noreply@blogger.com (Grimsley Robotics) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 23:54:00 +0000

Welcome to the updates page of the Team Prion Website. We will post weekly updates with the progress of the robot. Today we attended the kickoff on Moorseville. After watching the kickoff video, we participated in a chassis build. This year's game is Breakaway, a version of soccer for robots. You can watch the game animation that explains the rules at the US First Website.