3d Accelerometer Physics Engine -- a weekend project.

Facebook Group!

I've just established a Facebook group for anyone who Facebooks. Please join it for updates, as well as the opportunity to ask and answer questions! We'd like to gather a small community that can learn from our programmers and engineers, and offer and receive advice.

Have a happy holiday!

--gavin

Photos from Scrimmage

Victory photos!

Our truly makeshift-looking (but fully functional) robot!

From left to right: Noah, Alex, Eric, Winter and Zaq

PS: We also took a bunch of video footage, and hope that we can put it on Youtube sometime soon!

Snow Day Showdown

Recently we competed at the Snow Day Showdown scrimmage in Heightstown, NJ. We were hugely successful and went undefeated in every match we played.  In the final match however, our code became corrupted and forced us to step aside for the final match. While we were not awarded as we would have otherwise been, there was not one team who deemed us unworthy of the award.

Congrats Polygnomes!

:EW

Snow Day Showdown II

At 6:15 in the morning the Green Meadow Polygnomes set out from home base to head two hours south to Hightstown, New Jersey. Despite the tired faces, we were all optimistic about the competition. We asked ourselves many questions, including whether the robot would even run or not. We arrived at around 7:45, and unloaded our "mustard bus" which is a mustard color (shocker!). At around 8:00 we had signed in and set up the pits, and were ready to go to mechanical inspection. Despite a questionable size (18"...just ) and no flagpole, we passed the inspection and we headed to software inspection. Software inspection didn't go according to plan, seeing as we didn't have "enabled" and "disabled" worked in to the program. After a quick talk with Steve Rhodes, the programming wizard, we passed the software inspection. Upon passing inspection, we tested all of our programs and found out that our autonomous program didn't work. Another visit from Steve fixed that.

The opening ceremony was short and to the point, explaining the rules of the game and stressing gracious professionalism. Since our robot wasn't in the first match, we utilized the time to view the match. Zaq, Noah and I got ready to compete in the second match since Zaq and I were driving and Noah was the coach. I was a little nervous, but the excitement was far too great for it to be of any effect. The first 30 seconds of autonomous went great, and we successfully knocked one bin of pucks to the ground. The first operator control went great as well, and we successfully scored three pucks into the triangle. Our first match ended in victory!

The rest of the matches went similarly and all ended in victory, much to our satisfaction. We had many people comment on our robot (a few on the gnome) and we gained many fans. We also had a bye in the first round of the finals because there were only six teams and we were in first place. The second round of the finals was great, for the first match. Upon starting the second match, our robot wouldn't move, and we suspected the field because it had happened to another team as well, four times. After about thirty minutes of attempted repair, we graciously stepped aside to let the second seed team take our place as we made repairs. We ended up in second place, but we were all proud of our performance and besides, we had won the "Think!" award for the best engineering notebook thanks to Emma's handwriting and neatness and Noah's organization sheets. All and all, the competition was a huge success!!!

A quick update

I apologize for not updating any readers recently on our progress. However, we are going strong with the robotics kit, and have a design that we are attempting to use to pick up the hockey pucks and score them on the highest goal. We're having slight problems with fitting the design in the 18" cube, but I think we will arrive upon a working design soon.

I have been working on a program to keep the robot in one direction at all times with the compass sensor, and we are still assembling a proper drivetrain, while figuring out a good way to use our plastic.

We have a great set of teammates this year. We even have a side project with some 8th graders, working with the challenge that the Vex kit makers put out in response to FIRST abandoning them. Since we have our extra Vex parts and some motivated students, why not? We've adopted a second teacher, Mr. Henderson, the Biology and Math teacher, who guides the Vex group. They've made great headway over the past few weeks, with the help of Emma and Alex as mentors.

I'm very glad to see that many of the team members are interested in programming and willing to try it out. It would be sad if the programming aspect died out after I leave the school, but I don't think that will happen, since now we have a lot of enthusiasm for coding that was a bit lacking last year.

Anyway, even if it seems to our team like we aren't making too much progress, I think we are gaining knowledge and finding ideas, and will end up with a working design relatively soon. At least we have a method that we are pretty sure will work.

That's all for now! I hope to show some videos of our design as soon as we finish building it! 

--gavin

The PolyGnomes Last Year

This is a video showing our progress over the last year and our achievements, made by Noah Kaplan (our former pit crew chief and now part-time robotics team member). Great job! :)