2010 Yarmouth Robotics, Year One

[Stein]

I'm surprised Spore hasn't posted already.  Anyway, our team (Spore, Dimarco, me, and some other lame-Os that don't have TF2) went up to Orono, Maine yesterday morning with a barely-functional robot.  Nothing big that would get us a military contract even if it did work, all it had to do was pick up balls and get them over an 11" wall onto our opponent's side.  Our robot had a basket-thing that we got balls into, then the basket lifted (on scissor-lifts) to a height of between 11" (from the bottom of the basket) to at least 18+" if we had to get it over an opposing robot trying to block us.  The lift wouldn't work... Between eight AM and the start of the qualifiers at ten, we had switched out the gearing of the lifts to get it to work! Only problem is that on the way down, if we bottomed it out, we would literally split the plastic gears in half.  We got that sorted out later though.
After the qualifying rounds, we came in 17th out of 18.  After that, the way it works is that the top 6 teams become "team captains" of little conglomerations of 3 teams each.  The person who came in first place of the qualifiers was last year's world champion team, from some place in the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts.  All the 6 captains chose their first choices, and we still hadn't been picked.  We really didn't want to get stuck with one of the bad middle-school teams, who were somehow beating us except for one :p.  For some reason, Green Egg Robotics (world champions of last year) chose us for their second pick to finish their conglomeration.  We were pretty excited.  We got everything sorted out by the actual rounds, and we dominated.  the GER robot got flipped during the first round we played with them (only two robots on at once, but it matches of best two-out-of-three using all three combinations of two robots) and couldn't get up.  We dominated by a margin of somewhere around 150 to 7.  Yeah, really.  We ended up dominating during the final match even after GER rammed us by accident and got stuck.  We were stuck for around 40 seconds of the ~2 minute match, but after we got unstuck through teamwork or luck, we dominated again.  We won two trophies (one for winning and one for the "Amaze" or some-such judge award, the kind where every team gets one) and a poster that says we're 2010 State Champions.  And by the way, this was our rookie year.  Fuck yeah.

Anyway, Spore is the idea man, and he helps build.  Dimarco builds, programs, and some other shit, and I drive/program/co-drive/build and throw some ideas in sometimes.  I didn't drive during the actual rounds, because Benji (driver/codriver #2, or maybe I'm #2) had gotten more practice during the day because he's a controller-hog.  Spore's dad is a photographer and shot tons of video, so we'll get you guys a best-hits youtube video of the day and some videos of the rounds where we owned, and maybe one of the rounds at the beginning of the day when we completely sucked.

[Professor Funbucks]

I was supposed to work in yarmouth this summer.

[Sponson]

My high school robotics club did this.
Is this supported via BAE and shit?

[Spore]

Yep.

[Versus]

nice, good work ;D