Wednesday, March 24. 2010
The Boston Regional Starts tomorrow and runs through Saturday March 27. The trailer is packed and the advance crew heads out later today after school with the rest of the team following tomorrow after school.
The team has been busy for the past several weeks, and there could have been a lot to report out, but I’ve really enjoyed my several week hiatus! Refreshed and ready to blog again, let me talk about a few of the activities!
Chairman’s presentation preparation: The presentation team was selected. Shauna, Becca and Kyle have been busy at work developing and practicing this year’s Chairman’s presentation with coaching from a variety of mentors. Shauna and Becca were presenters last year, but Kyle is the new member of the team. Last night during the team meeting, the team got to hear the presentation for the first time, and Shauna and Becca got to see how Kyle would do with a large audience. Smile Kyle, smile! The presentation was wll done and does a great job of highlighting some of the important activities of our team. Doug Hitchcock’s red camo tuxedo jacket has been borrowed and new ties have been made by Andrea B. (alumnus Collin’s mom), so the presentation team is sure to look sharp!
Chairman’s video: Last night we also got to see the finished Chairman’s video. Crystal has been working very hard to gather interviews and select photographs to put together this year’s video. It was great, especially the awesome Theo monologue that accompanied it! Well done Crystal! It should be posted soon and I’ll include a link here at some point if you would like to see it.
The Button Maker has been smokin’! Almost everyone has been getting into the act of making the oodles of buttons needed tor trading at Boston and hopefully a head start on buttons for Atlanta. In addition, 5 special edition Regional Recognition buttons have been made for the Boston Regional to be used as recognition awards by all the teams in Boston. We can now see the bottom of the bottomless – or so we thought – box of button parts and will definitely have to restock the supply soon.
Rochester Rumble: Last Saturday, we hosted the Rumble for the FLL teams in the area. I missed attending, but it sounds like it was a success! I heard that there were 5 teams in attendance and that Thunderplucker was working again and was tossing orbit balls and rolling around.
Rolling…speaking of rolling, both our cart and our tool box had some work done on them to keep them rolling smoothly. It was especially noticeable on the well loaded tool box as it was moved out of the shop last night and loaded on the trailer.
Thunder…our robot, Thunderfoot, is getting some upgrades when we see it next at Boston. The robot sub teams have been hard at work redesigning the lifter mechanism and planning some other tweaks to enhance performance. Part of the process included building a light frame mock-up which was dubbed Thundertoe. This week, in what has been called Build Season Week 10, the new lifter has reached a point where it will be able to add some WOW to our robot! Alas, the lovely piece of netting that made our robot so photogenic at the Finger Lakes Regional will soon be obsolete, but after seeing the lifter in action, even I can say that the trade off of pretty vs “DID YOU SEE THAT?!” will be worth it.
And now that I’ve mentioned “did you see that?!” the Boston Regional is scheduled to be webcast on Friday and Saturday at http://www.thebluealliance.net/boston10/. You may also be able to find a webcast on the NASA site at http://robotics.arc.nasa.gov/events/2010_frcwebcasts.php. Keep an eye out for the “red camo” and see Team 1511 in action! (Thanks, Val for the links!)
Time to hit the road!
Photos of the day…well, photos of the interlude…
