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FIRST Robotics Competition Team 238
2018 October Newsletter
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This month we attended two offseason events and worked on a variety of projects including sponsor presentations, robot repairs and other technical projects. We also attended an FTC conference event where we learned about personal finance from our sponsor NBT Bank.
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Demos/Events:
Governor's Cup:
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Governor's Cup is a competition that every team in New Hampshire is eligible to compete in to win scholarships for New Hampshire colleges, run by FIRST NH. This was the first year of the competition, which was hosted at Plymouth State University.
The event went well. We finished 5-1 and seeded third overall. For the playoffs, we were picked by the second seed, Team 1729: Team Inconceivable! We then picked Team 3323: Potential Energy. Since there were six alliances, the first and second seed had a bye. After three dramatic matches we were eliminated as semifinalists.
During this competition, we experienced some technical issues with our robot. We learned that no matter how much you prepare for any problems, something can come out of the blue and stop you from succeeding. The point is to not give up and persevere and even when life is throwing shots at you, you keep moving forward and don’t let it weigh you down.
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Sunrise Labs Presentation & Demo:
Sunrise Labs has been a sponsor of our team since 2013. They have generously supported the team through funding as well as several mentors over the years. Every year, we do a presentation about our experiences during the season with a demo of our robot. We had a great time. THANK YOU to Sunrise Labs for sponsoring us for 6 years!
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RiverRage 22
RiverRage is an off-season competition that 3 of the Manchester high school teams (131, 238 and 501) host every year. It is the longest running FRC offseason competition. The event is held at Memorial High School.
This year, Teams 131 C.H.A.O.S., 319 B.O.B., and 5813 Morpheus took home the victory. On the opposing alliance in the finals were 6328 Mechanical Advantage, 1922 Oz-Ram, and 1519 Mechanical Mayhem. During the qualification matches, our robot Catwoman suffered damage to our wrist motor, a vital part of the intake. In the playoffs, we were called in as a replacement for 6763 FUSION in the semi-finals to play defense. We helped the alliance will one match, but the alliance was eliminated before the finals.
After the damage to our robot and communication issues, we have learned that unexpected complications will happen, and we must be able to work around and through these conditions. The wrist of our robot broke towards the start of the event, and there was confusion as to who would be on the drive team for each match, since for this competition we allowed all team members to have a chance to work as part of the drive team. We have learned to organize better and work to have replacement parts available if needed.
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October Projects:
Catwoman repairs:
After RiverRage 22, the team is working to repair the damage that occured in preparation of Battle of the Bay in November.
Booster Club Craft Fair CAD Layout:
The CAD team has been hard at work making a 3D layout of the floor plan for this year’s Booster Club Craft Fair. This project has been a good training exercise for those students new to CAD and it helps out our school.
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Software Training:
The software team's new members have been progressing well, and have had some prior experience in programming. It is our hope to have them work on testing the robot to fix its current bugs. We have continued to train the new software students in how to program in Java, which is the programming language that our team uses for our robot.
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Sponsor Treasure Hunt:
This year we included the whole team to brainstorm on possible new sponsors for the team. We worked to see what we need to do to keep our current sponsors and acquire possible new ones, we created a spreadsheet of all the organizations that sponsor us. In it we lined out how much each donated to us last year, some conservative estimates of how much we hope to receive for this year, how much we have received so far this year. We also made a list of potential new sponsors and any ties anyone on the team has to them. If you know of anyone who would be interested in sponsoring us for this season - click here for our sponsor packet
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Scouting Review Presentation:
The scouting presentation that we did with the team went really well. We were able to teach the new students how to scout robots in matches and also refresh the veteran students on how to scout. The students all scouted a match together and also saw what everyone got for a result. After we kept the new students to let them get some more practice in before RiverRage.
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Name Badges:
This year we wanted to make name badges for all team members. We wanted to make it easy to put on so we are using magnets. We have tried some of them out to see how it worked at one of our presentation and it worked really well.
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November 9th
Craft Fair Setup
November 10th
Battle of the Bay
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