Happy Thanksgiving! We hope your holiday was filled with lots of Raspberry pie and pi. The Firebirds have been super duper busy this season of Thanks! Attached is a picture of the things we are most thankful for, including YOU!
We spent time lately working hard on the Eaglebot challenge. Our girls have been spending more and more time trying our best to create an awesome robot! We have focused a lot of time and effort on the kicking mechanism, which is on the robot and able to run! We have been able to kick the football really far and cannot express how excited we are to showcase with our fellow Eaglebot teams! We are going to be hard at work again this week and today will be headed over to Norwood for mentoring the FLL kids, so we will keep you updated!
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These past few days have been very busy! We have spent a LOT of time both in the shop and outside of the shop- always being productive girls! This weekend the girls focused a lot on the kicking prototype and eventually developed a mechanism which has been mounted onto the robot! We have also refined code and the robot's frame has been completely extended. We also spent our Monday at Norwood Fontbonne Academy mentoring their FLL team! We were able to teach them a lot about sensors and watched their presentation, giving them some helpful tips!
We had such a busy day today! School ended at 1:30, so our girls ran downstairs (safely, of course :) to get started on the Eaglebot as soon as possible. The girls talked about the different drive trains available and the pros and cons to each one. With the original drive train, the programmers continued to work on getting the robot up and moving. The prototyping girls worked on the kicking mechanism and really advanced the kicker from the last time. They added more surgical tubing in order for the kicker to have more power when pulled back. The girls worked vigorously in the shop until about 4:30, then headed down to Wawa for dinner. After eating, girls headed over to Wyncote elementary school in the Cheltenham school district to show our robots at the school's STEM night. Alongside Simple Machines, 423, we showed our robots from Aerial Assist and Stronghold, letting the kids drive and play with the bots. They also had a chance to build cars out of Legos and race them! It was such a neat experience and everyone had such a great time!
It's been a while since we've updated you with our team life and boy do we have a lot going on!!! We are working on a robot for the Eaglebot challenge, which will be held on December 8th, as well as all our regular to-dos. Today we mainly focused on the Eaglebot challenge.
The Eaglebot challenge is a FIRST Robotics Showcase presented by NRG and The Philadelphia Eagles (fly eagles fly). We will be competing against 3 other team from our area in a couple of different challenges which you will hear about in our upcoming daily blogs. We have been working so hard and brainstorming like crazy, and now we are on to the technical part of the robot. Our girls all met in our shop today in order for us to divide and conquer as many of the tasks at hand as possible. Our build team worked on prototyping our kicking mechanism for the challenge which requires the robot to kick a football. They also widened the frame of our stronghold practice bot so that we could use it for Eaglebot, worked with motors in order to find the best way to position them on the robot with all the mechanisms we'll need for the challenge, and worked on speed controls for the motors. The speed controls are super cool because our girls can use a stand-alone mechanism to power the motors, making trial runs much easier (especially for our hard-working programmers!). The finance team met together and discussed the recent sponsor commitments and donations made to the team. The programming team was able to get the robot up and running while learning a few new skills along the way. The awards/outreach team prepared for our upcoming event, the Wyncote STEM night, brainstorming fun activities for the kids like balloon-powered lego car races! Our media team worked on the website, updating the blog and theme, as well as brainstormed ideas for our sponsorship video! Today was such a productive day and we can't wait to tell you about all our upcoming events, stay tuned! Today, we competed in Ramp Riot at Wissahickon High School. It was such an amazing, fun-filled day. We finished the qualifying matches in 7th place, and then became the 7th alliance captain. Team 365, MOE and team 1403, Cougar Robotics were also on our alliance, along with team 3961, the Redbirds. We made it all the way up to the semi finals, and even received the Judge's Award during the awards ceremony! We also had some special Firebirds alumnae come and visit us. Thank you to team 341, Miss Daisy, for hosting this wonderful competition, and making us all have a fantastic time in our last offseason competition for Stronghold!
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