The sun never sets on the FIRST robotics season...

Well. Atlanta is over, we didn't do as well as expected, but it was still amazing fun. My second time to the World Championships, and only my second year on the team? What more could I ask for (besides Championship Chairmans ;P). Thus starts team 399's ninth season of robotics. I hope we can make it to an off-season event this year, hopefully SCRFF hosts one~ It's too bad that most of them are on the east coast. We already have many more outreach programs planned, hopefully they tide me over until the build season. In the meantime I also plan to get that camera aligning a robot, and some other experience with programming. We have a lot to do.

I can only wait to see how this year progresses...

~Brad Voracek
".999~ = 1"

Philly.

So we got back from Philadelphia just over a week ago. We did very well considering the problems that we faced. Our robot seemed to have problems with just about everything, but that did not stop us. We had to change parts of our gear boxes, fix our car, porch (technical term for holding platform), and the lift. That was only a couple of our problems but we still managed to finish Friday with a record of six wins and two losses. Then saturday we had pretty bad matches and finished in the thirteenth qualifying postion. We had pretty high hopes for being picked during alliance selection and we got picked by the fifth alliance team, which was team number 539 and then we decided to pick team number 834. We went into the elimination rounds as the underdogs in both the quarter finals were we beat the fourth alliance in two matches, and in the semi finals were we went up against the number one alliance. This is were we had our catastrophic failure in the gearboxes, but our replacement cam in and helped our alliance take a win in the semi finals but we lost in two matches in the finals. I do have to say that our team put our hearts and souls into this competition from drive team to scouting to spirit. We left the competition with a barely drivable robot and two awards finalist and spirit. Thank you to all of the east coast teams that were there thank you for the great competition we had a blast and loved the city and the regional.

-Nick Hayes

First Annual Robotics Prom

Hosted by Team 399 at the Championships in Atlanta, Georgia.

This was an idea that had been thrown around all year long.

"If we go to Atlanta, we'll be missing prom!"
"What?! Are you sure?"
"NOOO!!"
"Man, we can just throw our OWN prom!"


Conversations like that came up every once in a while. Everyone always agreed that would be a good idea. No one thought it would actually happen.

But, after winning our bid to Atlanta in LA and before leaving for Philadelphia, we decided to make it work.
And, thanks to our lovely Product Integration Manager Brian and his skills, what we fondly refer to as "Nerd Prom" is up, running, and looking to be a successful evening.

That prom is going to be full of some of the smartest people in the country.

Exxcellent.
See you there!
And, dont forget to dress to impress!

:D
-jill minor

It's time to Rack 'n' Roll...

The build season has ended. Buster 399 is shipped. It was a good build season: six weeks of pain staking 14 hour days. The robot this year is competitive, I think we will do well. We have a lift that can reach all three levels, and a ramp that can hold two robots. Did we try to do too much? Maybe. A couple problems I foresee are the banebots transmissions... We know those carrier plates are going to fail, but if they fail at a critical time or not only time will tell. No (scoring) autonomous mode is also big. In the end we took off the camera, so it's probably not going to happen, at least not reliably. We'll try to program a deadreckoning mode, but with translation and rotation of the rack... bleck. At the Hawthorne Heights SCRRF scrimmage though this past weekend it doesn't seem like anyone will have automode, we will see at Los Angeles. At least we can throw together an autonomous that sets us up to load from the human player... I was a little weary about using the suction cup at first but the couple days we have had for practice it seems to work great. Our ramp looks good. Maybe a little small, but it is definitely reliable. So simple too. Only time will tell how we do... It's time to Rack 'n' Roll.

-Brad Voracek
".999~ = 1"