Post Robotic relaxation

Everything is calming down now after the FIRST Championships. I'm trying to capture some lessons learned and keep some thoughts and idea's for next time. If anyone has any fund raising idea's I'd like to hear about them. The money was probably the biggest hurdle.

We, team 704, does have pictures from Atlanta. One thing I'm doing now is buying a new and better camera with stabalization. A lot of my pictures came out fuzzy.

Below are some pictures on the team 704 odyssey that, mostly, I took. Also another link to the Google pic

FIRST Championships

This has been an exhausting weekend at the FIRST Robotics Championship in Atlanta Georgia. We arrived Wednesday night but it all started early Thursday morning. We got in un-crated the robot. We ran some practice rounds and started scouting teams as well as warming up the Robot.



More fun was on Friday morning...the real thing started...qualifying rounds. We started out strong, three wins in a row. Unfortunately the win streak didn't last. We had some poor luck of the draw, our alliance was with some weaker robots and we were against 3 robots that all wound up in the final rounds. Our alliance lost. We lost one more Friday when two robots were blocking us and our alliance robots weren't coming to help break us loose.

Saturday looked promising at first, at least until we lost our first round...then our second round. There were no good explanations except not much cooperation between alliance teams.

Alas, at the finals team selection, our team number was not called. The race for the Championship was over for us.

It was an exciting weekend. The high school kids had a lot of energy and some of it translated to me. I had a lot of energy...more or less. Over all it was fun and tiring, it's most certainly a labor of love.

Headed for the FIRST Championships!

Team 704, the SGP Robotics club, is headed from Atlanta GA for the FIRST Robotics Championships! This will be SGP's first trip to the big game!



We have the airplane tickets, another team will be taking some of our equipment to Atlanta in their trailer, and the excitement is mounting. I'm very excited! I contacted the Lockheed Martin internal newsletter about doing a story on the FIRST Championship. It's an event where there are potentially hundreds of future employees!

I was so excited I pulled out my NXT robot and started playing with it. I've also updated my personal web page with the robotics stuff from Dallas and Lone Star tournaments.