Recent Updates Archive
15 February, 2010
As we round the corner and begin to undertake our final week of the build season, the robot has gone to OSR in order to undergo some electronic additions, including our signature electronics board. So far this season, we have managed to venture outside our comfort zone a great deal as a team- building our first small robot with an ultra low center of gravity for the treacherous bumps (of doom).
We currently have a robot capable of kicking with great distance and precision, and which can scale the bumps at just under max speed- this will be a huge advantage for us, so look out at the competition this year. All that's left to do is implement our lifting system- our current design is lightweight and able to lift whatever we can hold.
To any other teams who see this: "Good luck at the competition, and we'll see you soon."
27 January, 2010
The website was updated with quite a few new pictures today. Ancient pictures from 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 were recently unearthed and uploaded to the site. Primitive "robots" can be seen in these pictures, as well as some of the very early FIRST competitions.
19 January, 2010
As our second build week opens up and our first is behind us, our team has seen significant progress in all areas. In fact, we've already built a cheap prototype of our proposed robot as well as mock-ups of the game props for this year, among many other things.
Our OSR team continues to develop more precise code for the camera, which, this year, will be used to track a large, relatively detailed target.
7 January, 2010
Just a reminder that the FIRST Kick-Off session will be January 9th for 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm at the Liverpool High School Annex Tech Lab area. Everyone should enter by the flag poles.
In addtion, everyone should bring a bag of "chips" OR cookies OR a 12 pack of soda or water for snacks for the first week of competition and for the kick-off day.
If Liverpool School District has a snow day or if after school activities are cancelled, then will be no robotics.
19 December, 2009
The Arctic Warriors had their final pre-season team meeting prior to start of the competition on January 9th 2010. This meeting was to allowed the Off Season Robotics (OSR) group to present to the full Arctic Warrior team a number of pre-season system design task accomplished. Each participant of OSR had to get up in front of the team to do presentation about one of the systems they worked since the end ot the 2009 competition. In addition, OSR presented to the new team members robot system designs that the Arctic Warriors have successfully used in competition in years past.
Following the December 5th Syracuse Police Departments demonstration of their SWAT Robot, this presentation has helped get this year's Arctic Warriors excited about getting ready to take on the challenge of the FIRST 2010 competition.
5 December, 2009
The Arctic Warriors had their second pre-season team meeting. This allowed the team to get a number of pre-season task accomplished.
Mr. Dischinger request for your "skills that you can contribute to the robot team" re-submissions were much, much better.
The results of the pre-season design challenge provided solutions that were very well thought out. It was noted that the overall quality of the sketches were very good. These sollutoins submittles could actually tell what most groups had in mind. That is pretty good, given the fact that the teams only spent 50-55 minutes on that activity.
Don't forget to mark the following dates and times on your calendars...
Saturday, December 19th from 10-11:30 the OSR group will be presenting to the group. Make sure you are in the Annex cafeteria no later than 9:45.
Saturday, January 9th from 1-4 in the Tech Ed room in the annex we will be having our kickoff design session.
28 November, 2009
This evening, the OSR team spent the night discussing preparations for the December 19th presentation. Things are all coming together for our group, and we're excited to show our colleagues what we've spent the past ten months working on.
22 November, 2009
The Arctic Warriors have begun pre-season preparations for the 2010 season. Today we met to discuss our plans for the build-season and brainstorming sessions.
The Arctic Warriors would like to thank the Syracuse Police Department and Lieutenant Flynn for giving our Robot Team the opportunity to have your demonstration of the Syracuse Tactical Robot at Liverpool High School this Saturday. It was a perfect educational opportunity to see robotics in action as it provided students with a true application of robotics.
Many of the students on the robot team are freshmen and new sophomores have never seen real robots first hand. Our experienced students found that having the chance to view a working robot up close very stimulating and eye opening. Our last year’s FIRST Robotics Regional winning drive team was especially excited having the opportunity to control a real commercially available robot and compare the experience of driving our own student built robot. This demonstration was a truly remarkable experience for each student to see the kind of things that they could do in the future in the field of robotics.
Our next Artic Warrior Team meeting will take place on December 5, followed soon-after by a meeting on the 19th where the members of OSR (off-season robotics) will present their recent projects.
20 June, 2009
It's been a couple months since the end of the "robotics season," though Mr. Nagy's team has continued to develop the team's technology further. Mr. K and the rest of the mechanical team have continued to work hard, and are currently building components for the group's off-season project, a tennis-ball-launching robot.
The software and electronics team have kept their focus on the advancement of the mouse project. Overall things are going great in the Nagy's basement and media will hopefully be online soon to prove that they're all not slacking off.
13 March, 2009
The Finger Lakes Regional is over, and the Arctic Warriors didn't come home empty handed.
The Snobot finished in 22nd, with 4 wins and 3 losses. However, the drive team preformed considerably well, and earned the respect of the #1 Seeded Alliance (Team 188, and Team 1507) and was picked to join as the third and final alliance partner. Combining Team 1507's undefeated robot, Team 188's shooter, and 174's defense, the alliance went on to win the finals, and had a record breaking final match score of 131 to 41! The Arctic Warriors are also the only team to ever win twice in a row at the Finger Lakes Regional.
On Friday, at the end of the first day of qualifying matches, the Snobot earned the Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology" Award, for its Optical Mouse Traction Control System. The Optical Mouse system was the brain-child of the subset of the Arctic Warriors team which meets every Saturday (Tuesdays and Thursdays on season) as OSR. Congratulations to those who worked on this specific subsystem, especially Mr. Nagy and Kenny Ballentine.
20 January, 2009
The team is in the process of finalizing the first prototype, and we'll be ready to begin machining final parts by the end of this week. Zach and Kenny are also making progress with the camera software.
16 January, 2009
Welcome to week two of the 2009 robotics season! As I'm sure you've noticed, we've updated the website's look, and have begun to update the site regularly. From here on out, we plan to have a couple updates per week.
Yesterday, we worked on the chassis and got the harvesting system working. Also, we finally narrowed our payload specialists to four sophomores and three or four juniors. So far today, we've continued to work on the basic structure of the robot, as well as work with the wheels.
3 January, 2009
The game this year was announced to be "Lunacy," an exciting game involving "supercells," "moon rocks," and lots of other cool things that make it a whole lot more awesome than last year's "Nascar" game. More about this year's game, the game's intro video, as well as our basic idea and plans for our robot, visit the Lunacy page.
13 December, 2008
Our three preliminary seminars that were held in November and December were very successful. We discovered that we would gain many new members to the team this year. The final seminar included OSR's "spectacular, awe-inspiring, audio-visual, interactive, surround sound" presentation that included real demonstrations of real-life robots! During this presentation, the team was educated in the inner-workings of the OSR team, and their productivity over the last 10 months or so.
19 April, 2008
FIRST Released new info about the new FRC Controller for next year. The new system contains a 32-bit processor running at 400mhz. The system now also contains a Wi-Fi access point to be used for wireless debugging, or other things and possibly real-time stats, as well as a variety of other features. Fortunately, this means that the prior electronics work that was performed to revamp the outdated 8-bit bus will no longer be necessary, and we can expand to develop our IMU as well as progressions through the FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array).Hopefully this new setup with advanced options will allow us to implement an operating system for full time use without any loss in speed, which will result in easy transfer from year to year, as well as to move forward autonomously for whatever sensory work that will be implemented in the future.
27 March, 2008
We finished our two practice rounds today in Boston. Although three rounds were planned for each team, we missed the first match by arriving late due to traffic. No mechanical problems were experienced all day. We should be ready for the first match tomorrow morning.
26 March, 2008
Tomorrow morning at 4:00AM sharp, we will be leaving for the 2008 Boston Regional, which will go until Saturday (3/29) afternoon. Good luck, and most of all, have fun at the competition, we're all hoping for another regional title.
9 March, 2008
Today marks the second time in team 174's history, as well as the past two years that the team has won a regional event. Our first time was in 2006 in the Buckeye Regional, in addition to this years win at the Fingerlakes Regional. To describe the series of events which sparked this win is in itself oddly improbably. As we arrived at RIT on our first day for the practice rounds, we found ourselves riddled with issues, ranging from underpowered batteries, to abused manipulators and gears through the wear and tear of competition. However, on our second day, we performed quite well, finishing the day in 10th place out of approximately 42 teams, a very respectable position for the FIRST competition, especially considering that the top 8 alliances pick who goes into the finals. With only one match left for Friday, we had a reasonably solid foundation no matter what the result of the match, which was in our favor, as we lost our final qualifying round, to leave us at 14th, still a very respectable placement. Unfortunately, while we were optimistic about being chosen for an alliance with such a high rank, we were not selected. Instead we were forced to wait outside the arena for a few hours while we waited for a chance to replace a fallen team, as we were first in line as a backup team. As we approached the finals, in the first match, team 191's tower was catastrophically damaged beyond the repair period allotted, and after their first win, we were allowed to step in for default silver medals, as alliance team members of team 20 and team 2053. As an eerie return from Thursday's problems, we lost our second final match and were only given one more chance to win the finals for best two out of three. By replacing our battery and backup battery, however, we came back to serve as an asset to the match's scoring, finishing the round four points behind the blue alliance. With luck, however, the judges called a penalty against the blue alliance for pushing our robot during scoring, and we were awarded as FIRST 2008 Fingerlakes Regional Champions.
7 March, 2008
At the end of today's qualifying rounds, we stand at 10th place, very close to the top eight. If we can win the last match tomorrow morning, we might be able to make it as one of the top eight and pick our own teams to ally with. Severe weather caused officials to delay tomorrow's events one hour in order to allow ample traveling time.
26 January, 2008
Our new 16-bit processors are even faster than we expected. We will be able to combine code from multiple chips onto a single 16-bit chip now. The driving simulation now works and a beta of the map has been uploaded. You can find it here here.
5 January, 2008
The 2008 OverDrive competition has been announced, and new ideas may be discussed in our Ideas and Concepts thread on the forum portion of the site. Members of team 174, please remember to come to the meeting Sunday, which will take place from 12-4pm in the LHS Annex Cafeteria, to start the season and take part in group planning. The Competition Manual and other related documents can be found here. All documents must be decrypted using the password: Drive!Straight?turn!LEFT!?
22 December, 2007
Our new forum is up and running. You can register and start discussing all robotics-related topics.
15 December, 2007
Today we introduced the Juniors and Seniors to our new driving system to acquaint them to the new driving setup to find possible drivers for the 2008 season. At the same time, other groups worked to finish our trophies which will be handed out during competition. Lastly, we worked further on our mascot in addition to fixing recently acquired website bugs and creating accounts for members to log-in to. As of now, the mascot was drawn using a program called Paint.Net by Mike Corsaro, a web-team designer, and is hosted on Image Shack.
4 December, 2007
Already in our pre-season, Team 174 has hosted a total of two meetings on November 17 and December 1, with our final until the new year scheduled for December 15. As of now we have accomplished many of our established goals including:
- Designed a new website for the 2007-08 season
- Completed our community service project, in which we donated our winter clothes to the Salvation Army for those in our area.
- Introduced the Freshmen to robotics and the experience which is FIRST
- Our OSR, or Off-Season Robotics group presented to the team what they’ve done over the Summer, including our new traction, electronic, and processing subsystems, giving us a demonstration of the power in both the tank treads and 3 speeds.
- Our team project to introduce the Freshmen to machinery, this year in the form of an industrial style trophy made of 80/20 and acrylic
19 November, 2007
Happy Thanksgiving!