News!
School is starting back up again
Once again, the school year is swinging back into session, and next week everyone will fall back into the routine of school.This means robotics club will begin meeting in a few weeks. YAY!
Several partnerships have bloomed
On May 21st, several members of the robotics club made a field trip over to The UCDavis mechanical shop for a tour, and so that they could make contact with a professor there who wishes to help with mentoring us next year by having a few of his students in the fields of electrical and mechanical engineering, come mentor our respective team members on those subjects.
We have completed the competition!
This year we made it into the first round of the quarter finals in sixth place, where we set the local competition's record for largest number of laps around the track in a single round with 10, averaging 7 full laps in most other rounds we participated in. It was an amazing competition, the spirit from all of the teams was fantastic.
We would also like to take this time to thank All our sponsors as well as UCDavis for supporting us and hosting this event every year.
Our Robot has been shipped!
We have, after a 6 week long build season, finally shipped the bot.
It's called The Rarecab, as its bumpers have designs similar to a taxi cab.
The RareCab features:
- Ackerman steering
- 3 wheel drive, one superpowered back wheel (all 4 CIMs)
- very fast, geared up from normal gearboxes
- optional ball herder (though it is not shown in any of the pictures or video)
2 Pictures and a short video are here.
A video on youtube of the robot driving around in our classroom is here.(It's the one in the aforementioned folder.)
Some other Information on the Competition
The official competition description pdf is here.
The webcast, that everyone that showed up for it saw, which serves as the introduction to the challenge is here.
As our local competition is being held at UCDavis, They have a site up about their involvement here.
The FIRST competition has officially started!
Gathering at 7:00 A.M. at a lecture hall on UCDavis campus, our team was introduced to our new challenge, and
the start of the 6-week long build season. We are currently (as of Sunday the 6th of January) designing our robots chassis,
and the possible ball controlling aspect of the robot. We have split into groups, Electronics, Manipulator, Drive Sysytem,
and Programming.
All groups are hard at work on their particular sections. It is our intention to make communication
and organization our goals for improvement this year, so that we may complete the robot with time for testing and with the feeling
that everyone had a significant part in making it, and in the descision making processes.
The F.I.R.S.T. website is here and the competition rules and regulations are also here in pdf format.
The animation done by FIRST illustrating the competition, as well as the kickoff video which all of the teams saw simultaneously at 10A.M. EST,
on Saturday, January 7th is here.
CW 13 Interview
We did an interview with a reporter from CW13, or channel 31 this morning. They were very nice, and we had a lot of fun.
They have posted the videos up on their website, which can be accessed here.
As the video is not on the first page, search for Davis or Robotics, which should bring it up.
Sacramento News and Review
We were featured in the Sacramento News and Review yesterday, 11/24/07, which is pretty cool!
The Article is here.
Videos!
A couple of the robotics related videos have been uploaded to a site where you can view them, available here.
FTC
We are also interested in starting a team for the FIRST Tech Challenge or FTC, for short. Information regarding this competition is here.
Update! - 10/15/07
The Official FTC team has been formed. Veteran club members are being encouraged to help mentor the new FTC team.
Based upon our current information, the FTC competition will be taking place on December, 22nd, in San Jose, CA.
The kickoff video and official game rules can be found here.
CalGames!
We would like to spectate Calgames as well, as it seems to be an interesting competition, game-play wise.
It will be a good time for new members to be introduced to what robotics is, and be able to observe
something relating to what we do for the FIRST competition, as well as others.
This will be on October 13th.
A good website for information is here.
A tentative agenda of what we are doing:
- Leave for Woodside from High School at 8:00am
- Games finish at 4:30pm
- Social events with other teams
- Leave for Davis at 6:30pm (may change)
The Official Schedule, in its most accurate form, is here.
Update! - 10/15/07
On October 13th, we attended CalGames, and it was a blast! There were lots of robots smashing into each other. Anyone who wasn't able to attend missed out on some big off-season fun!
First Meeting 2007-2008
We had our first meeting of the year on 09/11/07!