FIX IT 3491 News

After several hours of robot matches and other awards, it was time to announce the FTC Inspire Award.  They started reading the script that described the winning team.  The clues in the first sentence didn't indicate a single team. 

Then they started talking about how the team had jump-started FLL, and we wondered...

Then came a reference to our trackball mechanism, and we were pretty sure it was us.  But we still had to wait until the announcer read it out: “The winner is Team 3491 FIX IT from Victoria, Canada!” FIX IT was declared the winner of the 2017 Houston FTC World Championship Inspire Award!! 

The Inspire Award is given to the team that truly embodies the “challenge” of the FTC program. It is an apt recognition of the many hours that the team put in over the past year—not only in building and programming its own robot, but in helping to establish, coaching and mentoring now fewer than seven new teams in Victoria—essentially singlehandedly re-establishing an FTC league in British Columbia, after years in which it was the only one. 

This is a great finish to the year.

We had a great time celebrating with our family and FTC friends, and FIRST even provided the fireworks!

Then it was the first part of the Awards Ceremony.  The team celebrated when it was announced as one of the six teams nominated for the Control Award, for programming.

A couple of awards later, was the Think Award for the Engineering Notebook.  The team was surprised and delighted to be nominated for this, too.

The top award is the Inspire Award, which is given to the team that truly embodies the ‘challenge’ of the FTC program. FIX IT was shocked to hear that it was nominated for this, too—along with three spectacular teams (Tesseract, the Ducks, and Error 404). We all have to wait until Closing Ceremonies tonight to find out who wins....

Since its introduction in 2010, the FIRST Dean’s List Award has attracted the attention of prestigious colleges and universities who desire to recruit FIRST Dean’s List students.

Ten Outstanding FTC students are selected each year for Dean's List.  This year, FIX IT is very excited to have the first ever, FTC Dean's List Winner from Canada!

Here's a picture of Aila with Dean Kamen.

Our Autonomous mode worked perfectly in two matches. Some judges came back for follow-up interviews and we had a great time meeting all the other teams and learning about their robots.

We've been scoring more particles than at BC and are quite happy with our performance. We are looking forward to seeing how Fermion does tomorrow. Be sure to check out the live feed tomorrow.

Above is a picture of the team in our pit, and Fermion showing off his new illuminated side panel.

Global STEM Corps volunteers mentor FIRST Global national teams.  They can be matched with a national team from around the world and help that team while they build their robot and get ready for their competition which will be held in Washington DC in July 2017. FIX IT has been matched with the team from the Ivory Coast (http://first.global/nations/ic/).  We'll be meeting with them virtually as they learn about FIRST and the process required to build a robot for the H2O Flow Challenge. 

“We arrived at the CBC office and took out Fermion and demonstrated him to the hosts. We spoke with Gregor about FTC, Velocity Vortex, Fermion and the Championship in Houston. It was a new challenge for us to describe the robot without being able to point to it and demonstrate it. Unfortunately, we didn't have Fermion introduce himself over the air. Overall though we feel the interview went pretty well.

“It was very cool to be in a soundproofed broadcasting room with all of the fancy microphones and insulation. We thoroughly enjoyed talking on the radio and hope that this will help garner more interest in our team and FTC in Victoria.

“The interview hasn’t been posted on the program’s web page as yet, but we’re working on getting permission to host the audio ourselves, in which case, we’ll put a link to it here.”

– Alec Krawciw

FIX IT isn't competing in the event this year, but we've got one team member, an alumnus, parents and mentors all volunteering at the event.  

Here are some pictures from the Pits as teams were starting to get set up.  We'll try to post more pictures tomorrow.  The transformation from a large, mostly empty, room will be amazing:

Match 13 was probably the most suspenseful match of the day, due to lights which kept turning off, and a robot which started just before the clock.  It was a lot of fun for the spectators to watch and for the robots to play in.

Our team ranked 3rd with 8 qualifying points. We were chosen for an alliance with Auto Vortex, the team from Romania, and we became the Winning Alliance! The finals matches were tough, and were very close, decided by the autonomous period and particles scored.

At the end of the day, when awards were given out, we received the Control Award, so now we can say we have the best FTC programming in Canada. We will be seeing Helios and SKID at the World Championships, in Houston at the end of April.  We have a lot to do between now and then.

Our thanks to Faculty of Engineering at the University of Victoria for agreeing to host the competition. 

Fermion, our robot, performed well. During autonomous, he always scored one particle and usually scored at least one beacon. Strangely enough, it wasn’t always the same beacon! In a semi-final qualifying match we got 85 points in autonomous which was a perfect score for that program.

In tele-op, our team was scoring 3-4 particles in the centre vortex.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get our cap ball lifter working in time, but fingers crossed for the BC Championships!

We managed to win all five of our qualification matches, so we became the first Alliance Captain. We selected Team 10015 SwatBots Red (for their amazing shooter) and Team 10544 Cyber Eagles (for their great cap ball lifter) for our alliance.  It was a great alliance with all the robots working well together.

During the awards ceremony, we were thrilled to be recognized as the Inspire Award winner from the Alberta Championships!

Despite our best efforts, autonomous didn’t work this competition. For some reason, Vuforia couldn’t detect the image targets while we were driving towards the first beacon. It may have been the actual images and the way they were mounted on the playing field.  At least we'll have some time to figure it out before our next competition.

By the end of the qualifying matches we had won 3 matches, tied 1 match, and lost 1 match.  When added with our league scores, FIX IT was ranked 4th overall and was an Alliance Captain for the final elimination rounds!

Unfortunately, we had a series of problems in the semi-finals.  Our shooter broke in the first match, then the motor on our collector broke in the second match.  So we didn't advance to the finals.  

But...—we won the Connect Award and the 3rd place Inspire!  We’re going to the Washington State Championships!!!!

Congratulations to the Inspire Winner - 11104 Bearded Pineapples  and the Captain of the Winning Alliance - 3805 Atomic Robotics!

We put it on github for other teams to use too!: WireBoy ( https://github.com/a-krawciw/WireBoy/releases/tag/V1.0-beta )

Here's a sample wiring diagram from WireBoy for a robot this season.  This release is the first version of the WireBoy software and doesn't include support for the Legacy module at this time.

Hope you like it!