Nerds Make Science Fun!

Well, I’ve been gone recently, and I blame FIRST Robotics. Our school formed a team for the FRC, which is the main competition, for high school and with the largest robots. It’s not a battlebots-like competition, since FIRST encourages sportsmanship and all that good stuff. They have a new game designed every year, and this year’s was basically soccer, with a goal at each corner of the field, foot-high, trapezoidal speed bumps, and two towers with crawl space and ball return chutes. The idea was to score goals. Balls would be returned rolling off the towers. Extra points for hanging off the top or sides of the towers at the end of the game.

We started the team in mid-May of last year, and the fundraising and planning started at the same time. We ran into problems, since NASA’s rookie grant went to Valley Christian of San Jose instead. We ended up getting a one-week extension to pay the whopping $6,000 registration cost, $5,000 of which came from a surprise grant from Google, and the rest of which came through fundraising and donations. As a note for now, we also fundraised for the money that actually went into building the robot. We also got another $1,500 from Dale’s Hardware, where our school goes for its maintenance supplies, provided we name our robot “Dale” and give two demonstrations of the robot at the store sometime this school year.

We started off designing the robot in Solidworks. Though we admittedly spent a bit too much time on the design and not enough on actually experimenting on our robot, computer design did give a lot of help on knowing where to position things and how to size them.

Part of why we spent so much time on design was because we sent our computer design to our co-captain’s dad, for him to machine out. He had to ad-hoc part of the design, which made it get back late. In the meantime, the team put together the default kit that FIRST gave us. I wrestled with the code a bit and got it running. I proudly deemed this “the first thing I made that could kill people.” This got the response of “I like how you said first.”

Later, the team had put together the robot we were planning to use, and ran into spacing problems. This resulted in some stupidity involving plastic boards and a whole bunch of mis-sizing. After we (someone else got stuck with that job) ground down the excess plastic since the safety bumpers for the robot had to be flush with the robot’s body.

Either way, after some more code fiddling and sifting through documentation, I got pneumatics working. That is, the pneumatics control device (a solenoid if you actually know what it’s called) worked. Turns out the device that actually controlled the pistons had a dead valve. One of our mentors gave us a new one. Our robot could now stab people in the shins.

Fast forward a few weeks, and I’m pulling an all-nighter to get all the code in, so that the robot will be able to use all the features we put in just that night, like the ball kicker itself. When morning rolled around we found out the kicker wasn’t working, but we basically said “screw it” and shipped off the robot.

Silicon Valley Regional:
We unpack the robot and spend all of the first day from about 8am to 8pm trying to fix parts of the robot, edit code, etc. We ended up missing two of the matches the next day due to some outdated software and other issues, since we couldn’t pass inspection and get on the field without that stuff. We basically panicked the whole day as we frantically tried to fix the kicker and add a ball guard. Our robot also got flipped over about every other match. We placed around 35 out of 50, and won Rookie Inspiration, which is the “Little engine that could” award. We could make a robot, but couldn’t win anything better. Rookie All-Star went to some 4-H sponsored team, when it should’ve gone to Valley Christian. Seriously, one of the 4-H team’s robot features was listed as “coded entirely in C++.”

No crap, Sherlock. Have you ever tried to code anything in two languages at once? It’s impossible. The team’s robot and presentation were both shoddy and unimpressive. It’s all good, though; Valley Christian won Rookie All-Star at the next regional they went to.

We set our sights on Rookie All-Star again at:

The Las Vegas Regional:
First, I now hate Las Vegas, for sure. We panicked less, and finally got that ball guard/roller working, so we could hold the ball in place. We nixed the kicker and added 2 more motors to the drive train. It went better than at Silicon Valley, but we still missed an early match due to problems at inspection. I also had some coding issues with the drive train that I worked out eventually, and we found out our robot was ridiculously stable. Even with a faulty drive train, it could run over a bump.

The biggest problem we had was that, during our second or third match, our CRIO (essentially the CPU of the robot) broke for no good reason. It had never broken in Silicon Valley, and we had run the robot tethered in our construction area literally minutes ago. One reason the field crew suggested was the metal dust near it, which hadn’t caused any problems before and which we had never bothered to get rid of. It was aluminum dust from some grinding done to the chassis. Did I mention aluminum does not conduct well?

Either a tiny piece of dust suddenly and inexplicably got into the CRIO, or the field crew messed something up, since they mentioned we were the fourth team to have a busted CRIO that day. The team captain is looking into it and filing a claim.

We placed 41 or so out of 47 and won Rookie Inspiration, again. The team that won All-Star actually deserved it this time, though. They got a double ticket to the national event. They also ended up on the winning three-team alliance that gets sent to the national event in Atlanta, Georgia. All I can say is: Good luck with 971 (Last year’s national champions). They beasted all over everyone at Silicon Valley, and they’ll probably do the same at nationals.

All’s well that ends well, I guess. Our robot and a bunch of loose tools are probably at the school by now, and we’ll crack the crate open and dust off Dale. Only problem is, Dale’s hardware still hasn’t given us that $1,500 (the understanding was that they give us the money, and we just have to give demonstrations some time or another). We also need a new $500 CRIO (we’re looking into that), and we still have to give those demonstrations. Either way, it was a fun year, and I’m hoping we get to have a robotics team next year.

That being said, our school and students have no good mentors, so we’re pretty much a purely student-run team, so we have no chance in the competition. Our school could pay for extra mentors, but we’re already a little tight on money, so that may not be the best idea. Whatever happens, I’ll end up leading something, be it a robotics club or a MathCounts team. Here’s to next year.