Supposable Thumbs - FTC Team 4106

09/02/2018

The announcement will come out from FTC Wisconsin on Tuesday, but we want to pre-invite anyone who follows us on Twitter or Facebook to our FTC Launch Party on Saturday, September 8th at Heritage Christian Schools, Inc.. We will start at 10:30 am and end at noon. We'll watch the kickoff video and will have a fully built field to interact with for the teams who come.

To register, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with the following information:
Team Number & Name
Number attending coaches + Students
Coach's Name and phone #

Please be gracious when signing up to only include those you are certain will come as space is limited and if you say you are bringing 10 and then only bring 1, you are possibly blocking 9 other students from coming. Registration must be received AND confirmed by reply e-mail by 5pm on Thursday, September 6th. We may ask teams to limit attendance to allow more teams to come.

THUMBS UP!

09/15/2017

Hey Teams,
If you are new to FTC and want to see how we break down the rules of a new game, check out this new video showing how we would do it using the RES-Q rules. Enjoy let us know if you need hand.

Thumbs Up!

Tim describes how the Thumbs break down the game each year using the RES-Q game rule book.

09/14/2017

We fixed a rather huge bug in our Engineering Notebook app that prevented teams from changing from our yellow color scheme and Supposable Thumbs Icon. Unfortunately, you will need to re-download the app because you won't want to turn in a Notebook with our team identity on it! Here's the link
http://bit.ly/2vGgrFp

Be sure to check it out and let newer teams know about it. We hope it will help everyone be more efficient and lower the learning curve of doing FTC for new teams!

09/10/2017

Check out our very own Tim Keup in the FTC national game kickoff preview video! Tim, that wasn't cheesy at all!

We're so excited to present this year's FIRST Tech Challenge game! Learn more about the FIRST Relic Recovery season on our website: https://www.firstinspires...

09/10/2017

Catch the Supposable Thumbs very own Tim Keup in the FTC Relic Recovery intro video! Great job, Tim. That wasn't cheesy at all!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRsu7bRFhx4

06/06/2017

This year we re-did our booth completely for Super Regionals and we are so proud of how it turned out! Here are some pics!

05/04/2017

For 8 years we've been blessed to have Tim Keup as a part of our robotics teams at Patriot Robotics. His passion for excellence and fun-loving spirit define all he does. From his 5 years in FLL, culminating in a 3rd place finish at the World Festival, to his 3 years in FTC, all including trips to Super Regionals and most recently to the World Championships, Tim has challenged all of us to think harder, work harder, be better and to care more about our robotics outcomes and about our work to mentor students and coaches across the FLL and FTC universe. There is no way we'd put in the hundreds of hours of mentoring, outreach and robot design each year without his leadership and sense of humor to make times in the car and times in the lab so much fun!

From your friends on the team, from your coaches past and present, congratulations, Tim, on this remarkable accomplishment! You have been our superstar for years and it is fun to see others see it in you, too!

At the recently completed FIRST World Championship in St. Louis, Tim Keup was recognized as a winner of the Dean's List. The award, named after famous American inventor and FIRST founder Dean Kamen, is the highest individual award a robotics student can receive. Tim had won distinction as Wisconsin's winner at the WI FTC Championship in February, and was selected from among 140 other superstar winners from other states and countries to receive this global honor at the recent championship. Tim is one of 20 winners out of over 300,000 of the brightest tech minds in the world participating in FIRST Tech Challange and FIRST Robotics. As a role model and ambassador for the FIRST program, Tim will now participate with the other winners to continue to inspire their generation to greater involvement in and expansion of STEM initiatives across the country.

04/06/2017

Proving that even the smallest of tweaks needs testing, here's a pic of our beacon miss in the finals match. The robot had been a perfect 26 for 26 in competition, excluding one match that resulted in an immediate robot crash after auto started. At supers, excluding the 1st match, where the start of match signal was confused for a false start signal and we stopped auto, we continued to score the beacons every single time.

But then we missed one. Shock. Must have been a beacon failure because the robot never fails. 4 or 5 matches later, in the semifinal, we missed one again. Impossible!

We got home and lo and behold a minor tweak to push a metal piece out of the way from a potential jam spot pulled a piece of surgical tubing over just slightly. The tag end of that tubing was left unnecessarily long and blocked the travel of our beacon hand when pushing the back side button by about 1/2". It was just enough to keep it from pushing the button hard enough to ensure a score.

Great lesson learned about minor changes and about making sure every part is perfectly conditioned for the robot. It was literally a 1 seconds snip of a scissors to fix the problem when we discovered it after we got home.

Also a great lesson that at the tournament, you'd be better off looking into any possible way your robot could have been the failure rather than blaming a field component fault. That's what we did. We assumed we couldn't fail, so the button must have been broken. But it really wasn't. We were.

04/06/2017

The Supposable Thumbs are headed to the World Championships!

We were winners of the 3rd Place Rockwell Collins Innovate award for our robot design. Also, after a hard week of fighting through some unexpected mechanical problems, we were able to finish 12th in our division (out of 36 teams). We were selected by the #3 Alliance Captain as their 2nd pick during finals alliance selections. We were defeated 2-0 by the outstanding #2 alliance in the semi-finals.

Prior to the super regionals, we had played in and won the "Thumb Bump" scrimmage which had 8 of the 72 Supers teams at it. Of those 8 teams, 7 are headed to Worlds, so it was a great warm up for supers. We went 9-0-1 at the scrimmage and averaging nearly 200 points in qualifying and over 230 in finals. But our robot may have had a little too much wear and tear? We'll never know for sure, but the the Thumbs are hard at work doing another robot refactor to ensure more robustness in the areas they found weren't as solid as they wanted.

Next up for us is the FIRST World Championships in St. Louis in 3 weeks. The team has two specific

03/14/2017

The Supposable Thumbs have dedicated themselves to enabling more teams to participate in FTC by lowering the often steep learning curve. One area many new teams struggle with is knowing how to get started with the engineering notebook. We are excited to announce that FTC’s first ever professionally developed engineering notebook application is ready for Beta Testing!

Experienced teams may have an established method of doing notebooks. That’s great! This application is designed to allow less veteran teams a quick way to get started with making a beautiful looking story of their journey without having to master all the tools that doing something completely custom entails.

We are seeking teams in our target audience to beta test the application and provide feedback before the application goes public in August to the entire FTC community. If you are an inexperienced team looking for a way to get started with the notebook and are willing to put some effort in to test the application, we would love to help you while you help us by testing the application.

To find out more and to apply for beta, please follow this link
http://www.supposablethumbs.org/thumb-bumps-tips-tricks/engineering-notebook-app-beta/

THUMBS UP!

The Supposable Thumbs have dedicated themselves to enabling more teams to participate in FTC by lowering the often steep learning curve. One area many new teams struggle with is knowing how to get started with the engineering notebook.

02/24/2017

How much impact does FIRST have? These two students have moved to another school in our area, Daniel joined the local FRC team there and Chandra go involved in many other activities. But 2-3 times per week every week for the past 5 months, they've continued to return to HCS to mentor one of our FLL teams. How many students do you know that would do that? Thank you Daniel Anderson and Chandra Chouhan for giving back to the next generation of FLL students after having such good experiences yourselves. You are gracious professionalism in action!

02/15/2017

The 2017 North Super Regional Team List (Unofficial) until NSR publishes their list. Please comment below with contributions of details of states where info is missing or incomplete.

Numbers following awards in parenthesis [] is Number of Super Regional appearances before this year and Number Worlds appearances before this year. Sort of a 'post season experience' factor. If you are on the list, help us fill it in!

(15) Michigan (Middle School)
6134 - Black Frog Robotics - Inspire 1st [2, 2]
8593 - No Limits - 2nd Inspire, Motivate
5957 - Sonic Eagles - 3rd Inspire
10477 - Rapid Robots - Think
8579 - Classical Engineers - Connect
8845 - The Wild Bees - Innovate
6079 - Bionic Broncos - Finalist Alliance Captain
9572 - ChatterBolts - Finalist Alliance 1st Pick
8580 - Oakview CyberDragons - Finalist Alliance 2nd Pick
7253 - Raging Robots - Winning Alliance Captain
10255 - RoboDux - Winning Alliance 1st Pick [1,0]
11691 -Scripps Dragons - Winning Alliance 2nd Pick
5291 - TOWR - Control
10614 - Marysville Jr-ViBots - Rank
6043 - NC Gears - Rank

(2) Kentucky
3537 - Mecha-Hampsters (Indiana) - Winning Alliance Captain [2, 3?]
8417 - Lectric Legends - Inspire 1st [0,0]?

(2) North Dakota
7190 - Green Girls Robotics (Minnesota) - Inspire 1st [1, 1]
7123 - Fellowship of the Loose Screws (South Dakota) - Inspire 2nd [3?,0?]

(2) Nebraska
6929 - Data Force (Colorado) - Inspire 1st [1?, 0?]
5153 - Tachyons (Iowa) - Winning Alliance Captain

(2) Wisconsin
4106 - Supposable Thumbs - Inspire 1st, Winning Alliance 1st Pick [3, 2]
10294 - The Edge - Winning Alliance Captain [0, 0]

(5) Ohio
9789 - Toxic (Indiana) - Inspire 1st [1, 1]
5040 Loveland Nuts and Bolts - Inspire 3rd [0,0]
6022 - TBD - Winning Alliance Captain [2*, 2**]
5501 USS Enterprise - Winning Alliance 1st Pick [1, 1]?
8581 - Aedificatores - Winning 2nd Pick
** TBD was 2015 World Finalist Captain and 2016 World Winning Alliance 2nd Pick, also 2015 NSR Winning Alliance Captain and 2016 NSR Winning Alliance 1st Pick

(8) Minnesota
8686 - Height Differential - 1st Inspire, Winning Alliance Captain [2, 1]
7655 - The Q is Siqlent - Inspire 2nd [2, 2]
7152 - Robot Squad - Winning Alliance 1st Pick [3, 2]
9205 - Iron Maidens - Inspire 3rd, Motivate [1, 1]
11873 - Parallax Shift - Winning Alliance 2nd Pick, PTC Design [0, 0]
8808 - Ponytail Posse - Think [0, 0]
10555 - Tekceratops - Finalist Alliance Captain[0,0]
9890 - The Rubies - Connect [0,0]

(3) Indiana - Feb 25
9790 - Vier Left - Winning Alliance Captain [0,0]
10133 - Machines of Mayhem - Inspire 1st [0, 0]
535 - Tobor - Inspire 2nd [3?, 4?]

(9) Illinois - Feb 24-25
8817 Fruit Salad - Inspire 1st [0,0]
10138 - Newton Busters - Winning Alliance Captain
7129 - RoboRaiders - Inspire 2nd [3,2]
10091 - NYAN - Winning Alliance 1st Pick
5452 - Robot to the Knee - Winning Alliance 2nd pick [3, 1]
7351 - Dynamic Signals - Finalist 1st Pick [1,1]
10635 - Unknown Element - Finalist Alliance 2nd Pick
5037 - Got Robot - PTC Design Award [2, 3?]
5199 - Duct Tape & a Prayer - Rank

(2) Michigan High School - Feb 25
4537 - DRSS Enterprise - Inspire 1st [1,0]
5256 - Spare Parts - Winning Alliance Captain [0,0]

(14) Iowa - Feb 24-25
*5975 - Denver Cybots - Inspire 1st [3,2]
8696 - Trobotics - Winning Alliance Captain
5466 - Combustible Lemons - Inspire 2nd [3,2?]
10435 - Circuit Breakers - Winning Alliance 1st Pick [0,0]
9925 - Delta Robotics - Inspire 3rd
8813 - Winter Soldiers - Winning Alliance 2nd Pick
10547 - Mortal Combots - Think, Finalist 1st Pick [0,0]
10214 - Lightening Legends - Finalist Captain [0,0]
9955 - Synthesis - Connect
11316 - Weapons of Mass Construction - Finalist 1st Pick [0,0]
4156 - RoboCats Red - Finalist 2nd Pick
5340 - Gone Phishin' - Innovate [1,0]
9968 - CrossFire - Motivate Award [1,0]
7236 - Recharged Green - Rank
*Cybots were 2nd pick of the NSR Winning Alliance for Cascade Effect and NSR 1st Place Inspire for RES-Q.

(8) Missouri - March 4
9956 - The Knack - Inspire 1st
10173 - Robotics Genesis - Winning Captain
*4211 - The Bombers - Inspire 2nd [3,2]
3409 - Astromechs - Inspire 3rd
408 - Shoredinger's Gorilla - Winning 2nd Pick
2867 - Degrees of Freedom - Think
10841 - Pirates of the Grand Isle - Connect [1,0]
4964 - Rolla Patriots - Finalist Alliance 1st Pick
* The Bombers were the NSR Winning Alliance Captain for Block Party.