ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Sorry for the delay with this post... I've been busy discovering just how much time it can take to prepare for college placement exams and Calculus AP tests. :-) Here's a video that shows the capabilities of Power Surge's robot, "Spike". BTW, Spike is a reference to a voltage spike, which is another name for a power surge. The video shows what Spike can do in autonomous mode as well as tele-op (driver control) mode: One of the robot components shown in the video that might not be as well known as other parts of the robot is our Intake System, or our mechanism for retrieving pucks off the floor. At the regionals, we had an intake system that could get one puck at a time, and that required quite a bit of accuracy on the part of the driver. Also, the puck had to be on a flat area. This made it slow and unreliable for us to get pucks off the floor in matches. In preparation for Atlanta, we wanted to improve our intake system, since we thought opponents would probably ...

Power Surge had a great time competing at the FTC World Championships this year. Congratulations to the teams on the winning alliance: the RoboRaiders, Longhorns, and Jr. Bomb Squad! My team was ranked #1 in our division after winning all of our qualifying rounds, and made the highest score in both divisions (222). In the elimination rounds, we made it to the finals in our division (Edison), but a strange problem hit our robot and kept us from winning them. I'll be making some posts later on with pictures and videos of the event and of our robot. -Jonathan

The FIRST Championship event, held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, GA, is coming right up. The FRC Championships, FTC World Championships, and FLL World Festival will all be held there during April 16-18. You can find more information about the event on FIRST's website, here . My FTC team, 2945 Power Surge, has been very busy for the past several weeks preparing for the FTC World Championships, and we're finishing up the final preparations on our robot, team shirts, pit banner, etc. We hope to see you there! -Jonathan http://www.teampowersurge.org/

...things are going well. Power Surge competed at its first scrimmage and its alliance came in second. It was a lot of fun; the aspect of having four big, powerful robots all in the same field competing with each other made it very exciting! Now we're working on improving our robot for the state regionals coming up. We've also put up a team website at http://www.teampowersurge.org/ . -Jonathan