Team 238 is preparing for our robotics themed pop-up art show with the help of some amazing sponsors to be held at the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire on December 7th from 5-8 p.m. For this art exhibit students have worked very hard to create decorative wall hangings using various small metal nuts and screws, repurposed motherboards and larger metal plates and pieces. The wall art will be finished with LED lights that are activated with the touch of a finger.

Also, we have used the framework of small battery powered robots and turned them into works of art that move. Each robot is designed differently and is unique. The art pieces have been developed over the course of a few months.

Thank you to our event sponsors IEEE, Sunrise Labs, Macy Industries, and the Aviation Museum of NH! Looking forward to seeing you all next week. For more detail, check out the feature in this week’s Hippo Press about our event.

You can RSVP at: https://www.facebook.com/events/378470079256092/

Battle of the Bay Competition

The last off season competition we competed in 2017 was the Battle of the Bay competition in Prospect Mountain High School in Alton,NH on 11/11 hosted by team 319 Big Bad Bob. We started off slow in qualification matches but then we improved during the playoffs, starting as the 9th alliance but eventually defeating the first seeded team. We advanced to the finals but due to unfortunate events the opposing alliance won. We had a great experience and felt very welcome as always.

Battle of the Bay Imagery & Branding Seminar

During the Battle of the Bay, team 319 Big Bad Bob gave us the opportunity to provide a seminar for other teams about branding and imagery. Our Marketing subteam discussed the purpose of branding, elements of imagery, and its use in our team’s materials. We shared our current works in progress and future improvements, and we brought examples of apparel, pit materials, and robot design to aid attentive teams in their efforts to stand out professionally amongst other teams.

In the end, many teams found our presentation to be interesting and informative, asking many questions and energetically requesting more detailed information. We hope that this experience proves to inspire more creative and established brands amongst our fellow teams.

To view our presentation and branding resources, check out this link: http://frc238.org/resources/marketing/

Mechanical:

This month the mechanical subteam has been hard at work doing multiple tasks leading up to the 2018 season. We continued organizing and recycling a lot of our leftover metal stock. For the longest time we had very unorganized storage of our metal cutoffs and excess material. Our solution was to sort through all seven containers and decide what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to recycle. Most off this metal ended up getting recycled. This month we received a generous donation of various aluminium stock from our sponsor Millennium Precision. This material will be used in our upcoming 2018 season to build the robots.

Next we finish our ongoing process of painting our storage unit (The Cave). For the past couple months the entire cave has been being repainted to match our newly painted wall.    

Electrical:

This month, we’re working towards rewiring our 2016 robot Tumbler. Tumbler will be assisting our drive team’s practice as a defense bot. We made a basic wiring guide for any new electrical recruits or to help refresh our memories.

Sponsorship & Presentation:

Earlier in the month we traveled to Sunrise Labs one of our Crown level sponsors to help spread the word of FIRST and our team to all their employees. Two-Face was a popular topic of discussion as Sunrise employees were very intrigued about how he worked.

Marketing:

During the month of November, the Marketing subteam was hard at work preparing the Imagery and Branding presentation at Battle of the Bay and assembling team 238 “swag-packs” for our team members. Each pack contains a pair of 238 safety glasses, a branded lanyard, business cards, a sticker, and a button. We are continuing to prepare for the upcoming season and 2018 marketing materials.