OSU

(Mars rover running over part of the Nerd Herd)
The university has inspired my son....Love it!! Hopefully if that is where he wants to go he will work hard and make it there.



FTC was yesterday, with a few changes our bot didn't seem to have as many problems as last week. So we went we battled, we were in 6th place and ended up getting alliances with some teams that we weren't sure about. In elimination round we won one and lost two so we had to wait to see if we were going to get a trophy. We were nominated for four different trophies: Innovate award (think outside the box), PTC Design award (Robot design), Think award (excellent journaling), Inspire award (Truly embodied the challenge). We received the PTC Design award so we will be headed to State later this month! All their hard work paid off.



Highlights of the day:



1)When our bot shot 6 balls into the net on autonomous mode

2)Watching our team work with an alliance to stop the clapper(it had hands and would clap when it got points), a robot with a very simple design but always got mega points because no one thought to dump all the balls out of the tubes so it couldn't get any balls. Way to go Tayler and Aaron, Sydney, Kiley,Kyrie, Annika.

3)Watching Tayler and most of the team get ran over by a big robot that the university had. Prototype mars rover, that the university is working on.

4) Looking at Sid when our team was nominated for many awards, and seeing his thumbs up and smile when they got an award :)

5) Seeing the smile on the kids faces when they won!



Way to go Nerd Herd!





(this is us teamed up with the Clapper. Both robots were malfunctioning; we couldn't shoot....the clapper couldn't dump balls from the tubes, so we worked together to get it done.)

Nerd Herd formerly known as Banks Bots

We are no longer the banks bots..... just call us the Nerd Herd! The team has graduated from FLL (first lego league) to FTC (first tech challenge). What a great group of kids. In the first few pictures here, our robot was on autonomous mode....all programed no help from the kids. For 30 seconds all the bots could do as much as they could before the time was up. Our bot was programmed to shoot the balls in the net. I think it got in 5 one time and if the Kracken hadn't stuck it was supposed to do 8.

After the 30 seconds of hands free then the kids got to manually control the bot for two minutes, using xbox controllers. Tayler and Aaron were the driver and the shooter and ball loader (one control for moving, one for the other functions). They work really well together. For the last 30 seconds there were some bins outside of the ring that they could shoot the balls into.

The point system goes like this. Balls in base below net- 1 point. Balls in net- 5 points. Balls in bins- 10 points. During autonomous mode all points made double, and if you release the balls from the towers (four of them at corners of ring) that is worth 5 points. For every round you win you get two points, tie one point, lose 0 points. Each team got 5 runs, them and their team (four bots per run, two to a team) shared points and then if they got more points than the opposing team and won they got the other teams points also. Whew are you still with me.

So all the points added up put you in a place at the end. We were 5th out of 24. We were one of twelve that went to elimination rounds. THEN after all that, the teams got to pick alliances for the elimination rounds, it ended up being 4 teams total with three teams making the alliance. On elimination round, they run 3 times. Sadly we didn't win either one of ours so we will be going to Corvallis next weekend to try again for the chance to go to state.

After the autonomous mode our bot had a glitch and couldn't pick up anymore balls or shoot them soooo it got to play defense, get in the other bots way so they can't score. Below we are trying to stop the one with the red flag from scoring in the bins.

Short video showing our bot making one shot into the net before it had a glitch.