Chop Shop 166

Last weekend the Granite State Regional, which we attended, took place. On Saturday, we were picked by the 5th seed alliance and on Friday, we won the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Controls Award. The description of this award is, (from the Awards section of the competition manual) "This award celebrates an innovative control system or application of control components to provide unique machine functions."

Our software people who worked hard to implement traction control, camera-assisted trailer tracking, and autonomous were absolutely elated, as you can see in the following pictures.

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Our team has made the papers (again), this time dealing with our participation in the unveiling at Nashua High School North. We had a great time seeing how other teams solved the various problems posed by this year's game, then getting to socialize with our fellow teams.

Today marked the unveiling of several teams robots from all around New Hampshire. It was hosted by Nashua North High School, and about 15 teams were in attendance.

All of the teams did a wonderful job with their robots and their presentations. Our team had a rap to describe their robot, which added to the fun and helped our team stand out.

 After the unveiling, the food was served in Nashua North's cafe. All of the FIRST students and their parents went and ate together. Music pounded from the auditorium and there was much insanity as our team members mingled with those of other teams.

Today was Kickoff 2009, the first day of the FRC build season.

After cramming in the theater of our school, we watched Dean Kamen's speech and the entire webcast on a projector screen, and learned about this year's game, which is Lunacy.

After that, we retired to the Robolair to plot how our robot would act. 

The Segway Raffle is finally over. The winner is Shawn Jones of Dracut, MA.
We made $2701 in profit, which will go towards buying a trailer for our team to transport the robot.
Congratulations to Mr. Jones and have fun with your new Segway PT!

Our LEGO camp, a 5-day day camp for elementary- and middle-school age kids has an article in the Nashua Telegraph. The LEGO camp is a great way to reach out to the community and get people interested in science and technology in addition to being one of our most enjoyable fundraisers.