FTC Delaware Regional, Part 2

EDIT: You can see videos of our robot that Ken Johnson posted on the FTC blog, here.

Like I posted about earlier, the FTC Delaware Regional Tournament was held on Saturday. What an exciting event! It was held in conjunction with both the FLL and JFLL Delaware State Championship, so it was a pretty major event with lots of teams and spectators.

Speaking of FLL, I was realizing at the tournament that I've now seen FLL from three totally different perspectives: as a team competing in it, as a referee, and now as an outsider looking in. It was interesting to see how vastly different these perspectives are, and it's also something that's good to keep in mind when one is refereeing or competing.

2945 Power Surge had a lot of fun competing and watching other teams compete. Our robot performed way beyond our expectations; we won all 11 of our matches, and recieved the Winning Alliance Award (equivalent to FLL's 1st Place Robot Performance) with our alliance partners 3165 Twisted Bots 2 and 7 Techbrick, and the Inspire Award (equivalent to FLL's Champion's Award). Our highest score in a single match was 213, in which we scored all of our alliance's points; no other alliance got higher than 100 points, and we broke the highest known record, 166 points. The second place alliance was composed of 134 R.A.T.S., 404 Charter Impulse, and 395 RoboAuks... congratulations to them and all the winning teams!

Here's a few pictures of the event:

Some of the audience... there were many people there!

Working on the robot before the matches... we had to do a good bit of tweaking to make the robot work with the competition fields (which were somewhat different than our practice field).

The tournament supplied a nice LEGO "brickbox" (instead of a sandbox) for the little ones to play with when they got a little bored. :-)

#2945 Power Surge with our robot and trophies. From left to right: Kevin, Phyllis, Chase, myself, Isaac, Timothy, and Kathleen.

The tournament was a really fun experience for us, and we're looking forward to our next regional in NJ next Saturday.

As always, you can learn more about the team at our website: http://www.teampowersurge.org/.

-Jonathan

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Celebrating MINDSTORMS with a Remix - Part 2

The ROBOTMAK3RS continued their celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS through these summer and fall remix projects. Each ROBOTMAK3R was tasked with selecting one LEGO set of their choice and combining it with a MINDSTORMS set. Below are the five amazing models they came up with. Remote controlled material handle r by Jozua van Ravenhorst (aka Mr Jo) This remix combines the LEGO Technic Material Handler (42144) with MINDSTORMS EV3 (31313) It uses the power of pneumatic cylinders to move objects around. By using a bluetooth remote control, very precise movements can be made with this model. Touch sensors in the base chassis prevent the turret twisting the cables that go through the turntable to much. The program has several protections to prevent over pressurizing the system for each of the 3 individual pumps and valves that control the 2 booms and claws. The real version of this machine is mostly used in waste material sites to bring the material to machines that sort and

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