It's been a while, and many things have happened over the past number of months. For better or for worse, the team members never seemed to turn off. Time was spent practicing CAD, learning about machining, spreading FIRST and STEM to our community, visiting our FIRST family across the globe, and tackling three off-season competitions.
The late summer has also been a somewhat interesting time for the team - summer training, off-season competitions, local outreach programs, lab cleaning, and international travel all occurred during a time when our head coach was mostly unavailable. The strength of our leadership students and mentors helped pull the team through a period of tough communication, without dropping any plans or events. I'm most impressed that none of this commitment was forced (outside of drive team practice, more on that later), and yet this year we saw the highest attendance for summer training. So far, I think the growth in knowledge and attitude really shows. PNW 2019 - you've been warned. We're hungry. And we like super hot spicy wings. -Er- Thai food.
Mentor Tattoo Story
So here's a fun story to start off with: we now have 2 mentors with tattoos specific to 4911. Great start, talking across a forum where the target readership is high school students, about tattoos. Let me simply say, the tattoos look cool, but the underlying message behind the tattoos is what most interests me. I've seen 5 years worth of seniors depart this school, venture off to college and the world, some of whom return as mentors, some return on a given Saturday to say hi (and steal some pizza), and some who disappear into the dark knight. er. night. Over those 5 years, I've had a core family of mentors that I see almost year round, sharing the joys and the elation of a successful prototype, the sleepless nights, and countless failures. Each student will eventually leave the team, most will leave a significant mark, and all will add to the story that is the CyberKnights. As mentors, we have longer views of the process and the program, the pillars that constantly iterate, improve, grow, and sometimes fall. I have a wall of pictures in my house, and we have 2 mentors with tattoos. 4911 is a living story that we choose to commemorate, celebrate, and share in our own ways. Each and every student on our team, every alliance partner, opposing team, pit neighbor, outreach participant, and so many more, have a mark in our story. (My mark is the ferret emoji added to our Slack. It's mine. You can't have it. Alex and James, quit stealing it!)
Anyway I promised a fun story about tattoos - so here we go. The tattoo artist for one of our mentors learned that he was a mechanical engineer, and was super nervous to draw a set of gears. So our mentor ended up printing a draft from Solidworks, having taken the time to design properly sized, scaled, and meshed gears. Next time you see him, ask him about the gear ratio :-) (He's going to hate me for that...)
Drive Team Training
I've talked about our design training in previous posts, but this year we also added drive team training. We were fortunate to have one of our former drive captains return to us as a mentor, and helped plan drills, run tryouts, and provide feedback on what makes a great driver, great. For drive training, we ended up inviting any and all team members to try out, adding Saturday to our existing Thursday meetings. Because mentors do have lives (sometimes) and were not looking forward to unproductive added time, we did enforce an attendance policy on the students committing to drive practice.Our tryout program consisted of three distinct sections. The first few weeks was letting anyone and everyone get some time driving, learn the robot, do some NASCAR loops and figure 8's, and just, well, goof around and enjoy this beautiful machine we created. The next few weeks were about drills - identifying the skills and wants that we were seeking from a driver and operator. We had eight students in our tryout, and over the course of phase two, we randomized every driver pair and took notes on communication, dynamics, and overall ability. The drills were focused on cube acquisition, strategic decision making (pathing, driving around obstacles), and good understanding of the robot (driving with the camera, depth perception drills, and more). Our final phase of the tryouts involved creating specific pairings and running more practice matches and scoring drills. Mentors took notes, solicited thoughts and comments from our student leads, and ended up selecting two driver pairings. These drivers continued working on drills and practices matches in preparation for 2019, as well as the specific competitions of Peak Performance, Chezy Champs, and Robot Rewind.
Our lab space is incredible, however we sadly don't have a full field on which to practice. Or even a half field. We probably have 1/3 of a field. To run these drills and practice, we had to make due with what we had. Our scale was the correct distance from the "driver station", but accessible on only one side. Our switch was only half the competition size. We had our competition tool chest tucked into the corner, protected by folding tables. Having a full field would be a huge step in increasing our teams effectiveness at competition, but we make due with what we have. The important part is running wheels on the ground, and getting as much drive time as possible with what we do have.
International
Another of my favorite things about robotics (I seem to have a lot of those), are the opportunities to meet people across the globe. FIRST has done an amazing job of making their programs available internationally, and I've had the pleasure of meeting and working with teams from Canada, Mexico, Israel, Australia, Vietnam, and even New Hampshire! (I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think New Hampshire is even from this planet. People there are wicked weird man... ) ((It's ok, I grew up in New Hampshire :-D)) (((Try the maple syrup. Trust me.))) Through the CyberKnights, I personally have been able to visit Israel and Vietnam to share my passion for FIRST, meet some amazing people, soak in some incredible views, and gain empathy for different cultures and lives around the world.Israel
This past August, myself, another CyberKnights mentor, and three students flew to Israel to work with team 4590 GreenBlitz on their summer Robotics Seminar. This year, they invited several groups of students from Vietnam to join them in Israel, learn about FIRST, how to build a robot, how to compete in FIRST, and more. I'll elaborate on the 'and more' clause. Yooda is the coach of GreenBlitz, and he's just like Mike, coach of the CyberKnights (and other Mikes, coaches of other teams). He's extremely enthusiastic, passionate, and a force of nature for inciting positive change on the lives of those around him. During this robotics seminar, Yooda shared his vision with the group - groups of kids who have passion are capable of transforming themselves, their communities, and their countries. FIRST is a great example of this - students get excited sharing this knowledge of problem solving, leadership skills, compassion and fierce competition. School curricula are getting transformed, because groups of kids are getting passionate and creating change. If you want to make an impact on the world, you have the capability and the capacity to start, right now.The week-long seminar was almost entirely devised by the students of GreenBlitz. They created a brand new game, based on FRC-style play, but the robots would be built using Lego and the EV3 kits. The students from Vietnam would be able to read a game manual and break down the game and scoring system. They would prototype and build robots, and hold a competition at the end of the week. Our students were quickly brought into the fold, helping lead discussions, working on the field software, and working with teams as they built their robots. This small competition got all of the students excited and engaged. By weeks end, they were holding discussion and conversation about our hopes and goals: to have more FIRST teams started in Vietnam this next year.
Side story: There's a quote: 'one day you'll look back on this and think it's funny'. It's pretty much universally true. Due to.... some travel agent planning... we missed our flight from New York city to Tel Aviv. So we had almost 18 hours to kill in NYC - catch some sleep, then 10 hours of exploring! Well, the subway is awful - smells bad, was SUPER hot, and after a night of not sleeping well, it wasn't working for us. So we got off the subway and went topside to the streets. We were roughly 2 miles from the American Museum of Natural History, and it was a beautiful day, so we decided to walk. Then the downpour started. 2 miles through Central Park, carrying bags, anxious to get on a flight, getting completely and utterly soaked. You can imagine where my mind was at. Long story short, we had a great time at the museum, got successfully to the airport, and boarded our flight to Israel. Looking back now, it was all pretty funny. OH - the story didn't stop there, it took 3 days longer for our students to get their bags. hashtag-carry-on-all-the-
Compass Alliance
TCA is back! The Compass Alliance is a partnership of world-class international teams working to improve the capabilities of all FRC teams. Last year we built up programs for Help Hubs - shared resources for teams local to one another, Call Center - a email and phone service staffed 24 hours a day to get immediate answers to any FRC question, Tag Teams - Veteran teams partnering with Rookie and other young teams as buddies to help them throughout the season, and the Resource Repository - a collection of Pathways designed to teach rookie and veteran teams the best practices and best resources for many aspects of FRC.This year, we are working to improve each program based on feedback and usage last year. Resources and Pathways are getting updated, providing more topics and more content. We are being active on the forums and social media to promote more team involvement for Tag Teams and Help Hubs. On top of promoting our current projects, we are working on new ideas to help improve FRC for all teams. Stay tuned and follow the Compass Alliance to stay up to date, and learn more about improving your FRC experience.
https://www.thecompassalliance.org/
Off-Season Competitions
This year we seemed to continue our crazy streak, and planned to attend 3 off-season competitions in Seattle, San Jose, and Spokane. As noted above, we kept driving all summer, and that meant we had to maintain robot upkeep all summer. For 2 of the local competitions, we aimed to bring our practice robot and a second drive team to train and get experience for more of our students both working in the pit, and out behind the glass. Although these were not official competitions, we practiced, prepared, and executed the same as we did in season. We brought no new parts, no new autonomous, a brand new drive team, and didn't even bother to cut a second V2 climber claw. Ok, so maybe we didn't quite plan and execute at our normal level. We used these competitions as practice and training, for introducing our new team members to scouting, and getting our drive team students more time and experience on a real competition field. Each competition held different challenges, different levels of competitiveness, and offered different experiences from which to learn.
While life outside of FIRST kept me away from the first two competitions, I was able to join the team at Spokane. Robot Rewind was our third and final off-season. We had the most preparation, the robots were in working order, and we had just a short 5 hour drive to manage. For Robot Rewind, we brought our full off-season compliment (still a skeleton crew compared to in-season) - two robots, two drive teams, and a dozen other students split between scouting and pit crew. This would be our final chance to experience real competition before the 2019 season. It was crucial to ensure we kept the robots working, and ran every second of every match. Having any issues (even radio and/or USB hub issues) would be detrimental to our goals. Naturally, we had radio and USB hub issues that cost our second robot 3 matches of play time. A new USB hub (pro tip #1: don't use Microsoft Surfaces for drive stations) and a newly crafted power cable for the radio (pro tip #2: old radio versions don't run well using Power-over-ethernet) got us up and running for the rest of the competition. Our biggest lessons learned were to simply slow down. The day started with lots of rushed movement, dropped cubes, and many bumps into our alliance partners. Both drive teams settled down through qualification matches, and began driving more cleanly and smoothly (pro tip #3: during strategy talks with alliance team members, talk about the robot paths for the 5-10 seconds immediately after autonomous). Our two robots worked well together, and won their way into the finals as alliance partners. Just one final mistake to make - don't forget the little things - during finals match number 1, we started launching cubes into the switch, forgetting to be in contact or break the plane. We earned 75 penalty points and lost the match. This was the perfect time to lose, and learn from our mistakes. A quick discussion between matches, and we were back in the fight. We won the final two matches, and claimed victory at Robot Rewind 2018.
Competing in off-season events is great preparation for our veteran team members and rookies alike. With the lessons learned over the past months, we will start 2019 as strong as.... knights... (yow, that was painful to type...) (pro tip #4: good mentors have good puns. I'm working on it...)
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