Bainbridge Island Middle School Robotics Club

The Robotics Club is presenting at the West Sound STEM Showcase at the Kitsap Mall. Stop in until 3 today.

Attention Bainbridge Island Students Entering 7th or 8th Grade Next Year:

The Bainbridge Island Middle School Robotics Club needs your skills and passion for STEM. We are open to all students from Bainbridge Island and will be gearing up for another competitive season in the Fall as part of the First Tech Challenge. Come and see us at the Robotics Open House at Bainbridge High School on March 15, 2017 between 5PM and 7PM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huEXHetm_2o

BIFTC - Robotics Open House For more information about the Bainbridge Island Middle School Robotics Club attend the Robotics Open House at Bainbridge High School 3/15/17.

Set up for the first matches.

We are here early this morning preparing for the Inter-league Competition. There are 35 teams competing, mostly from high schools. The kids are excited and ready.

Were getting ready to start our second competition.

It's competition Day 2 and the teams are here early doing final robot checks. We're looking forward to a fun and successful day.

It's competition Day 2 and the teams are here early doing final robot checks. We're looking forward to a fun and successful day.

Match video from our first competition. In this match both of our teams are on the same alliance.

https://youtu.be/1aC_uIeM5wQ

Bainbridge Teams Alliance Match from our first competition of 2016.

The club had a fantastic first competition on Saturday. Binary Blackbirds team 8745 finished tie for the best record at 4-1 and in second place on tiebreakers. Circuit Breakers team 9374 finished in 5th despite suffering from a dead bot in their final round. Both are well placed going into out next competition December 11th.

Both teams had a successful scrimmage on Saturday 11/12. We learned a lot about our robots and the work we have left to do before our first competition next week. And we also got a close look at the state of some our our competition.

Video from our first scrimmage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp8UGfRomh4&list=PLU_jRMIWpZnU6P73tOoOLmlBKVF8V7j1Z

First scrimmage round for Circuit Breakers

Circuit Breakers Team 9374 Robot after the Build Day on Friday 11/11. Ready for our first scrimmage.

Binary Blackbirds Team 8745 Robot after the Build Day on Friday 11/11. Ready for our first scrimmage.

Our robotics teams had an excellent driver training last Thursday 11/10. The best news is that both robots moved! Both team's drivers we able to drive the robots around the field and practices our beacon claiming strategy.

Today we started making team buttons to wear and give out at our competitions, switched from a chain system to a motor system, continued working on a ball pickup system, a phone charging station, and a cap ball lift.

On Sunday we worked on updating our website, building and testing our beacon pressers, a phone charging station, testing the 8000 team's autonomous program, continuing building a cap ball lift, and a ball feeder. This week we will be running robot driver training and testing.

Team 8745 changed their name and logo this year! Welcome the Binary Blackbirds.

Here are some views of our robots in construction. We have about 2 and half weeks until our first competition and plenty of work to do.

The Club YouTube channel is up and running with some cool videos of our robots in progress.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbWQL8WDqEIeCLTCQpph4zw

Bainbridge Island Middle School Robotics

We are getting ready for our first competition. Today we continued working on our autonomous program, and cap ball lift. We started working on our ball collector, switching a sideboard, building an additional frame, beacon pusher, and mounting the ball shooter.

Important Notice about Competition Data Changes:

The schedule for our first two competitions has changed. Our new competition schedule is:

- Saturday November 19th at Seattle Academy

- Sunday December 11th at Seattle Academy

- Saturday January 14th Inter-League Competition.

More information about site and times will be coming soon.

At our meeting on October 23rd the teams continued working on picoboxes and electrical boards. We started today on assembling gear boxes, making out mecanum wheels, putting stands for the circuit boards on the frame, figured out what subgroups the students are in and started on the op modes.

On October 19th we continued working on picoboxes, our ball shooters, and the boards to put the circuits onto. We also started working on a cap ball lift, making a calendar, sensors, a email for potential sponsors, a phone script, and an article for the Bainbridge Review.

The teams have done their initial brainstorming on the rules of Velocity Vortex and have come up with the following game strategies for the first competition.

AUTONOMOUS PERIOD

In the autonomous period we will capture both of the beacons and shoot the pre-loaded balls into the center vortex. Then we will move the cap ball on to the field, then park on the center plate or the corner vortex.

DRIVER CONTROLLED PERIOD

During the driver controlled period we will capture the beacons and pick up and shoot the particles into the center and corner vortexes.

END GAME

At the end of the game we will lift the cap ball, defend and capture beacons, and shoot balls into the corner or the center vortexes.

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These strategy decisions have led to the designs for the hardware and software for our initial competition robot builds. We will get a lot more information about how effective our strategies are after the first competition where we will revisit and make improvements.

The new robotics challenge the club will be doing this year is Velocity Vortex. It's quite different from last year and we are working on some very different approaches in our robot design to score well. Here is a one page description of the game.

https://firstinspiresst01.blob.core.windows.net/ftc/velocity-vortex-one-page.pdf

firstinspiresst01.blob.core.windows.net

Today we started building picoboxes, we worked out bugs in our ball shooter, we started to attach the beacons to our playing field, leadership started to register students in TIMS, and web design and marketing set up a voting system for possible name and logo changes.

Here's our new team photo. We have an awesome bunch of young engineers and we are hard at work on initial design of our two team robots.