Just wanted to let the rest of the HAMB'ers know the good news. Squirrel has been working with his local High School team Since early January and at their regional competition in Phoenix today they not only won 2 awards but they also ended up in 2nd place out of almost 40 teams competing. This is only the teams 2nd year in existence so that makes it extra special that they have accomplished this in such a relatively short time. Nice going! I don't have any pics from the competition but I can share these that I "acquired".
I dont know what the competition was, But if I was putting together a team that had to do with anything mechanical, Squirrel would be #1 on the "folks I want on my team " list. Congrats!
Like I have said before, Squirrel is my hero. He is without a doubt one of the smartest people around. Congrats!!
Thanks! Yeah, I took it easy this time and let the kids do the yelling. And the coach, who is the chemistry teacher at the school, he still sounded hoarse today on the phone. The robot is for a FIRST Robotics Competition that gets high school kids into technology. It's great to be able to work with the kids and teach them something about engineering (and shop practices) as we design and build the robot. This year the game involves hanging swim tubes on a big rack, the robots play 3 on 3. The first part of the match the robots drive themselves for 15 seconds, then the students take the controls and play the game. btw, I'm a fan of old shop technology, we used an old Sheldon lathe, a pneumatic sheet metal shear, 36" pan brake, and old Rotex turret punch, and an old hydraulic arbor press for much of the construction of the robot. There is a computer in it, but I try to stay away from that, one of my sons is into the programming.
thats awesome.. our team competes at the end of the month at drexel university.. this is our first year.. we'll prohably get our tails handed to us, as other teams in our area have MEGASPONSORS.. whats cools is that the process was not unlike building (or rebuilding) any old car.. except there are so many rules, Rules that my students made sure I followed. I see that your team did a ramp... we have something similar, how well did it work? were the other robots on your team able to manuever up onto your ramp? how many rings did you place? what was the high score of the day?
Does the school have those tools or did you provide the fabrication facility? Either way a nice story.
We got some facilities help from an outfit on Ft Huachuca, we got to use an Army fab shop. The ramp didn't get used this time...we went mainly for scoring, with the ramp in case it's needed in a tight match to get the bonus at the end. Best score in qualifying all weekend was 128 points, we put on 6 of those 7 tubes! The kids built a great robot, I'm glad I pushed them to keep working on the design until we got it right. We hung in there in eliminations to the last round, one of the robots on our alliance broke and it was 3 on two against us...the winners had really fine machines, and knew how to use them. Good luck with your regional sawzall, this is fun stuff! Rookie teams seem to be doing pretty well this year, if you have a reliable ramp it's easy to get a high qualifying seed.
chiefdelphi is a great resource (Brian saw one of my posts there!) for help with any questions you have...there might even be a few squirrel posts
They had a competition during Cabin Fever a few years ago in York, Pa. It was cool to see what young minds could do with simple engineering skills and a lot of hard work. Way to go Squirrel for helping them !!
As I usually say when Squirrel's name shows up in a post when there's anything technical related - leave to Squirrel... Great job! Vance
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