Dalek Disclosure
March 2014
Volume 4 Issue 2
In This Issue...
Patrick Quinn | Communications Editor Dear Friends of Team3637 This has been a fast year for the Daleks. We have already competed in our first competition for the season. On behalf of the team, I thank everyone who helped us along the way. We have faced our ups and downs throughout the build season but we have completed our goal in building an excellently working robot in the six weeks allotted. Thank you for taking time to be a friend of our team.
Ryan Sidebottom| President At the conclusion of our first competition, the Mount Olive competition, we witnessed all of the hard work put in during the build season come together. The robot was functioning well, the Bill of Materials was finished, and the team was ready to compete. This resulted in a successful competition for The Daleks. Now that the first competition is over and our second one is looming around the corner, the team is back to work, working to improve upon everything that was not perfect at the first competition. The business and outreach team has begun to advertise for some of our upcoming events and fundraisers. The technical team is heading back to the drawing board for a little. We will also be running tests as soon as we can un-bag the robot. Even though we are not competing for a few weeks, everyone still has the mindset of “we need to get this done.� We all look forward to a better showing our robot, team, and school at the Bridgewater-Raritan competition.
TEAM SPIRT AWARD Beau LaManna & Patrick Quinn Our team was glad that we did not leave the competition empty handed; We were more than proud to accept the Team Spirit award. While our drive team worked hard trying to win the competition, the rest of the team demonstrated their Dalek pride on the side lines. We had plenty of team members there to show off our custom Dalek shirts and buttons while cheering for not only our own team, but for all teams as they took the field. The team spirit was carried out down in the pit as well. Our team was friendly to all the surrounding teams in the pit areas. Be it a wrench or a sonic screwdriver, the pit team was ready to lend a tool to a team in need. It was a proud day for Team 3637 and we are honored to win this award. We look forward to our next competition where we hope to not only continue to show our good spirit and character, but to be able to be a highly competitive team who has a good chance of bringing home a victory.
The Mount Olive Competition Shrey Patel | Vice President On the Friday, before our first competition of the 2014 season officially started, a small group of members were running through checklist after checklist making sure the team was prepared for the upcoming event. We packed up all the necessary tools and materials in the tedious process of setting up a small workstation at Mount Olive high school. This event’s pits was awkwardly sized: normally it is a 10 ft. by 10 ft. square, but we had to contain our team in a 9 ft. by a 12 ft. space. We surround our pit by a cage like wall, which is sized for the ten by ten space, but we had innovate, what engineers are best at doing, and make it accommodate our new parameters. Once we had our pit setup, we got to unveil our robot, which had not been seen for almost two weeks. The moment the bag gets pulled off the robot is a relaxing moment for all; we can see all the hard work that we had put in for six weeks finally paid off. Once the bag had been removed from the robot’s chassis, we started to fix every possible and impossible problem that could exist with the robot. We replaced flow control valves with regular connectors, finalized the skid plate on the bottom of the robot, tightened every nut and bolt until the Allen keys could not be cranked further, and placed decorative sign onto the robot that announced who were our “Platinum Sponsors”. We had half an hour until we the event coordinators were going to kick us out, and still had to get the robot inspected and get her on the practice field at least once. When a robot gets inspected, it must follow all rules stated in this year’s game manual, as well as being inspected for any safety concerns. The official weight was 119.3 pounds, which is .7 under the limit. After the inspection we rushed out to the field, and tried to see what all our hard work and dedication was capable of doing during a practice match. Several members of the team noticed problems with the robot’s movement. After the match ended we were to by the field management that the camera configuration we were using was using too much bandwidth, which meant the drivers had temporary control of the robot during the match. We rushed back to the pit, and started to get our belongings because the lady on the loudspeaker said, “One minute until the lights turn off.” We were not the only team reluctant to leave; nobody wants to leave the robot alone in the dark. One could see all the kids on the bus were thrilled in excitement. After the bus reached the school, most of the team was ushered to the stand to watch the opening ceremonies. We were the first match of the day, so the programmers had only a little bit of time to fix the camera options and make it to an acceptable bandwidth. Once opening ceremonies ended and the first match had started, the all the Daleks were excitedly cheering, hoping for an early win. We won the first match, but the rest of our day didn’t go the same way.
After that Saturday’s matches were all over the place. We won a few, lost a few, and oddly enough we had tied a match. Between every match the drivers came back to the pit with a small problem or another, and it was the job of the pit crew to fix it. The jobs were sometimes as small as tightening a bolt, or difficult as replacing the destroyed bearings which consisted of taking apart the gearboxes that caused the bot to drive and reassemble them in the 15- 20 minutes we had between matches. The pit crew did their jobs to a tee, because every time our robot was queued to play a match we had a working robot. After all of our scheduled games were played for that day, our record was 51- 6. As the team was preparing to go home the referees wanted a few matches to be replayed, and Match 31 was one of them. This was the game that we had tied, so we had the chance to change our record. The pit crew optimized the robot for it to perform at its peak by changing its battery, tightening important bolts, and put on the right bumpers. When the drive team went out onto the field, the team members had a new persona about them; they wanted hoped to see a great victory. The game was played through and we had one of the most monstrous wins of the day. The final score of the match was 95 to 42, which made us have a neutral record. The team was exhausted yet content as we left for the day and everyone was excited for the day to follow. The next day we only had one scheduled match left, after that you had to be picked by the one of the top eight teams. The score of that match was 105 to 73 which made our team have a new record of 6 wins to 6 losses. After that game all we had to do was wait for our team’s number to called by anybody else. Team 3637 name was called, and the bleachers exploded in noise. We had joined the fifth alliance, and we were all determined to make it to the finals. Our Alliance members were like us: none of us had the best robot, but we were firm in our belief of winning. Leading up to a first match as a team together, we had talked about a lot of strategy, but it all collapsed once the first game had begun. Our robot hadn’t moved throughout the whole match which caused our team mates to go into a mass panic and play the match like a free-for-all and caused us to lose the match. Once our matched ended, the drivers checked every possible source of error, and saw that an usb cable was not connected. After that match, our alliance members wanted to make sure our robot would work, and we were sure it would. The next game began and it started off in a more positive manner since the robot actually drove this time. Our team was scoring points as quickly as possible, but we could catch up to our opponents. They were scoring so quickly and we lost that match as well, but nobody on the team was upset, because We made it to quarter finals, and we can only move forward from there.
MAR Ranking Mathew Parrella Team 3637’s ranking in MAR right now is fantastic, out of the one hundred and ten competing teams, we’re ranked number twenty five after our first competition at Mount Olive. The Win/Loss/Tie record for 3637 is sitting at twelve points for the qualifying matches, and the way the W/L/T points system works is that two points are awarded for a win, no points for a loss, and one point for a tie. There were no ties in the qualifying matches that we participated in, so we ended up winning six of our qualifying matches, which was great. The highest individual qualifying match score we got was one hundred and eleven, followed by the second highest of one hundred and five, and in third a score of ninety five. These statistics and many more factor in to the overall points that determine what rank team 3637 is on the MAR ladder. We currently have twenty nine points to tie with teams 102 and 3314, who hold the ladder ranks of twenty six and twenty seven, respectively. After having the experience of testing the robot and identifying problem areas and finetuning the robot. In our next competition, Team 3637’s ranking is sure to go up to the top.
Fundraising Cookie Dough Fundraiser Danny Wasserman
Panera Bread Fundraiser Ashley Smith
Team 3637 has just recently completed our Otis Spunkmeyer Cookie Dough fundraiser. Members of the team each received a selling packet with an order form and brochure of the different Otis Spunkmeyer cookie items. Students went around to their friends and families advertising how much it would help our team if the bought some delicious cookies.. The fundraiser was very successful, the team made over $900! Delivery day went off without a hitch with help from mentors and team members. We had a huge participation from the team in this fundraiser which helped to increase our profits. The team hopes to run this fundraiser again next year and have an even bigger profit. We will use the money we made to buy needed parts and materials that we will use to make our robot better before our next competition.
On March 19th, HCRHS FIRST Robotics Team will be holding a fundraiser at the Panera Bread in Flemington off of Route 202. The fundraiser will be from 4 pm to 8 pm. When you present our flyer at checkout Panera will donate a portion of their sales to the team. Our Team’s profits from the event will go towards making changes to our robot before our next competition on March 29th and 30th. Note, Panera Card® gift cards, Panera® catering and other retail purchases are excluded from the event. Even though the robot is built we still need to collect funds for any spare parts we need and there is always next year. We hope that everyone will come out and support our team.
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