2007 felt like a trade off for us, we had one person who resigned as a teacher but simultaneously, other mentors had joined. Scott Lindley had found a job as a Product Engineer so he couldn’t spend as much time with us as he wanted. In return, Kevin Crader, Jeff Stone, Andrew Nicholson, Mr. and Mrs. Burkett, Mr. Wilson and Rod Schein had joined our team! These fantastic mentors helped out a lot! From the previous year, we had Mr. and Mrs. Jonsrude. Jeff Stone and Rod Schein were expertise in electrical, while Mr. Wilson, Mr. Jonsrude, Mr.Crader and Mr. Burkett in mechanical fabrication. Andrew helped us out in programming. He also brought the whole team to reality with his mad skills in physics. Heidi Burkett helped us out in all aspect of the team but mainly in Spirit. We want to personally thank all mentors for their help!
At our first design meeting, we came up with all the possible ways we can score and our priorities. We had many great ideas regarding the end effecter which will “pick up” the inner tube and place it on the rack. The end effecter combined with a very simple ramp idea lead us to a great design. We called the end effecter, the Cascading Arm. The only problem with the Cascading Arm was that we tried to do too much things with it. In other words, we would use the arm and cascade to 3 positions, the lower, the middle, and the top. While we were engineering the cascading arm, we found that it was drawing too much current and the battery didn’t enough juice to raise the arm up more than two times. The easiest way to solve this problem and unfortunately we couldn’t, was to design the arm so that it only get the lower and the middle rack. By the way, guess when we found our error? The day before our robot got shipped to the Portland Regional’s.
The team had to take a dramatic course of action so we decided to ditch the arm and become an all out defensive robot with a ramp. By luck, there were a few teams that could lift the robot up 12 inch’s so we our team was watched closely by other teams… We had won many matches just because of our ramp mechanism. That’s primarily the reason why we got chosen by the 1st and 2nd ranked team in Portland.
We competed, and competed, and competed some more until we got to the final round. The two best teams in Portland were about to go head to head in an epic duel to win the regional competition. This was a very exciding event. Unfortunately, the only thing we could do was to slow down our opponent from scoring and drop down our ramps in the final phase of the match.
Even though our team didn’t get first place, we got the Under Writers Laboratories Safety Award. We also learned a lot from our mentor and FIRST Robotics. 2007 also strengthen the idea of simplicity and design.
