THE SKUNKS!!!

Hello Everyone!!

Last week and over the weekend our team competed in the FIRST Robotics world championship in St. Louis, Missouri. There were 400 robotics teams from all over the world, more than 20,000 attendees, and many many parents and volunteers.

Our team proved its merit by making it to the Division semi-finals on the Newton field, and I think we have caught the eye of the rest of the world. Our Robot has never made it this far before in the competition. On top of this, after the competition was over, we had an the eighth highest OPR, meaning that we are the eighth strongest scoring robot in the world. Pretty cool, huh? we went out in the semi-finals, finally loosing to a score of 121 points, which is one of, if not the highest score of the championships event. The coolest thing however, is that we did a triple balance in the very last match we would play this season.  It was, to put lightly, freaking awesome.

This was my first year going to championships, and it was all that I hoped it would be and more. One word to describe it? HUGE. The level of competition is inspiring, and the entire event invokes pure awe.

The season is pretty much over now, but what an amazing season it has been. Some thank you-s to people that make the team who we are:

To the mentors, who put off what i’m sure are many better things (often times their jobs) for a while to work with us. Many people are surprised by the large number of mentors on our team, but they truth is you are imperative to our success…

To our sponsors – Boeing, OMAX, MicroRAX, PTC, PLATT, Alaska Airlines, SPEEA, Imaginetics, OSPI, and everyone, I have said it before many times, but   our team is who we are because of you  guys. The real truth is you are not only supporting the team, you are supporting innovation, imagination, inspiration, and the dreams of roughly 38 high school students. May I only ask one more thing of you, that you some day hire us into your companies?

A resounding thank you to our coach, Mr. Steele, for not only inspiring me personally, but for being, one might say, the rivets (# 10 hole, Pop brand) that hold our team together.

And a personal thank you from me to Camila, for being my Blogging Partner in Crime this build season, and for covering for me while I have been sick the last few days.

And here’s to next season! We are growing as a team rather rapidly, and I think we are going to take on (and beat) some of the teams the places like Michigan and the East Coast next year, and along with other teams from the Pacific North West, really establish the PNW’s place in the world of FIRST.

A bunch of pictures are below from this season. Anyways, thanks for reading, and keep on rooting for the skunks!!

Stay Smelly!

Liam Burke

PS: The Data that we got after implementing our “Bang Bang method is attached here: Shooter Data Final

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qualification Matches

Hello all,

Today was a crazy day, for both the pit crew and the rest of us.

Two quotes I have to share with you:

“Where is my room!” Morgen

and…

“It’s payback from Seattle! ”- Wendy after we won our 4th match of the day against 330, 2194, and 3018 by only one point. That match was so close that half of the team was holding their breath (the other half was munching on their nails).This reminded me of what Debbie Shafa said to us about losing first to understand our opponents if we ever got a chance to win in the future. We knew this was going to be a tough match so winning by one point was something I found it meaningful to mention… These teams, as well as many others at this championship have made us play. hard. I hope this helps illustrate just how fun and challenging this has been, and that in a lot of ways our hard work has paid off.

My favorite part, I would say, of coming to the championship is to get to see accomplishments and compare. Compare things like key design features, spirit focus, and team organization from each of these outstanding teams. Also, I almost flipped when I learned that we would be playing against 488 and 2122 in some of our matches. Besides being 2 great teams with awesome robots, we had the fortune to be finalists with 488 in Seattle and regional winners in Spokane with 2122. Playing against them was definitely interesting.

On another note, today, if you’ve been watching, you probably noticed that we ended up losing 3 of our matches in a row. I want to comment on our match against 2122, 2936 and 68 (match 95). We played that match scoring both balls during autonomous but when TeleOp came about our Pokey-Stick fired and the drive team didn’t notice or knew why we were unable to drive. Clueless of what was going on and rapidly running out of time, our skunk drive team rebooted the robot, bringing us back to life with everything running normally but with a little less than 40 seconds in the game. Unfortunately, by then our opposing alliance had a commanding advantage over us, and we did not win but managed to get co-op points. It is far better to get two points than none, so is that respect, our team was happy.

All in all, we worked hard today and did the best we could.

We have one more match in qualification rounds tomorrow, and we are going to pull it off splendidly! Just so far this is probably the best we’ve done in St. Louis…Out of a hundred teams, and we are currently placed in the top 15, that is a big deal.

Thanks for sticking with us and…

Stay Smelly!!

Camila