Hey, everyone! Welcome back! As we prepare for the MSHSL State Championships, for which we have officially qualified, we’ve started to work on our post-season outreach and fundraising endeavors. Our annual demonstrations at the Minnesota State Fair and 3M’s Robots Invade the Plaza event are still a ways off, but in the meantime, we’ve been working on some (comparatively) new fundraisers. Whether you’re a member of our local community or a fan from far away, we’ve made it simple and fun to show your support for our team!
Right now, we’re reviving the Gear Sale! For those not in the know, the Gear Sale was an event that took place in December of 2018 where students (or their parents) could purchase team merchandise, with the proceeds benefitting the team going into the robot build season. Said build season is long gone, but the demand for Team 2823 merchandise prevails, so we’re re-opening the form and making it accessible to anyone and everyone! We’ve retained some of the most well-liked products, and we also added two more: the Mystery Science Theater 3000-themed team uniform from this year as well as a 10-Year Anniversary Commemorative shirt. In addition, every item in this iteration of the gear sale can be customized with the message of your choice for a surcharge of $5.00! You can check out the merchandise and place your orders here. The form will close at the end of the month, so make haste!
That’s all for now, but stay tuned! More news is to come!
Welcome back! I know it’s been a while since the last update, but we tend to underestimate how hectic competition season can be, especially when it’s intertwined with finals and such, which makes it hard to sit down and write a blog post in full. That means I have quite a bit to go over, though, so buckle up!
Our first competition of the year was the Northern Lights Regional up in Duluth. It’s part of the “Double-DECCer”, wherein two regional competitions take place in one massive convention center. Excluding the international championship events, it’s the largest and most well-attended FIRST event in the world. We tend to perform poorly at our first regional, so we went into Northern Lights with relatively low expectations, but we did better than anyone could have possibly anticipated. Thanks to some fortunate matches, some killer strategy, and the extensive drive practice we undertook before the competition, we finished the qualification rounds in fourth place overall! That meant that we got to serve as an alliance captain and select two other teams to accompany us into the playoff rounds. We selected the Henry Sibley Lightning Turtles and the Data Bits, with whose help we advanced into the semi-final rounds! Unfortunately, due in part to an incredibly formidable opposing alliance and in part to our perennial “semi-final curse”, we didn’t advance beyond the semi-finals. Regardless of that fact, we were all more than satisfied with how well we did. Here’s a full summary of our match results:
After that came the 10,000 Lakes Regional Sponsored by the Medtronic Foundation (bit of a mouthful, huh? It makes me miss the days when it was called the “Medtronic Foundation Regional” or even just “10,000 Lakes”). Still reeling from our last competition, and founding our high expectations with some more drive practice and an improved bot, we presumed that this regional would go even better. Unfortunately, some iffy matches and unfortunate malfunctions resulted in us coming out of the qualifications in rank 40. Though we didn’t get to be alliance captains, we still managed to advance into the playoffs thanks to a very gracious pick from the team ranked 7th, Armada Robotics. They had a dependable climbing mechanism and were sturdy enough to perform some good defense, making them the perfect complement to our fast but light robot. We also picked The Breck Stampede, on whom, per their signature cheer, you can’t impede. We were pretty confident in this alliance, but we would face a similar situation to that of Duluth – success in quarterfinals, facing an incredibly good alliance in semifinals, eventual loss. It wasn’t all bad, though – our team’s long-running inside joke about “sending it”, the tactic of sending the robot careening to the second climb level named after a viral snowmobiling sensation, finally came to fruition. To our collective excitement, we successfully “sent it” in multiple playoff matches!
(We sent it in the match that the second video corresponds to, but, oddly, it cuts out before you can actually see it happen. You’re going to have to trust me on this one.)
So, anyway, all of that leads me to good news and bad news. The bad news is, unless we receive a wild card that grants us entry to the Detroit international competition (which is looking unlikely at the moment), we won’t be eligible for any more official FIRST events this year. The good news is, due to our unprecedentedly good performance at our first regional, we’ll be competing at the MSHSL Robotics State Competition in May! A bit of context: for robotics to be considered a sport in the state of Minnesota, there must be a State Championship, which is why this particular event exists. (Some states have similar events, but most don’t, as it’s not required by FIRST). Entry into this event is based on the amount of “district points” a team receives at their first competition, which are determined by rank, performance, and the awards a team wins. Normally, we don’t get all that many, but ranking fourth has its perks! In other words, the 2019 season isn’t quite over for us just yet!
As always, you can keep up with the Automatons via Twitter. There are more updates to come, so stay tuned!
Hey all! We here at HPSH Robotics are happy to announce how well we were able to perform at our latest regional, the Medtronic Foundation Regional. We placed 5th overall and went to quarterfinals with our alliance partners, the Governors and Blaze Robotics. We’re also ecstatic to mention that our lead programmer, Alexis Lipstein, was one of the finalists for the Dean’s List Award. Unfortunately, we were unable to achieve our goal of winning a blue banner, and therefore this means the end of the season for us. We’d like to thank all the people who worked hard on our team in build, programming, strategy, business. We’d also like to thank our alliance partners team 3745 ,the Governors, and team 3184, Blaze Robotics.
Hello again from The Automatons! Thank you for your patience regarding our website renovations.
A few weeks ago, we competed in the inaugural Great Northern regional in Grand Forks, North Dakota, with our robot Lord Viktor FrankenJank. This was our first regional of the season, as well as the first of its kind and part of the first competition week, so we’ve had quite a few firsts lately. During competition, we suffered from minor technical difficulties that prevented us from using our intake mechanism, but we managed to pull through and make it into 16th place overall thanks to some great work from our Strategy and Drive teams. Though we did not get picked, we were the highest-ranked team that was not part of an official alliance, meaning that we would serve as a substitute for any team whose robot could not compete. As luck would have it, we served as a substitute for team 2220, Blue Twilight, on the 8th seeded alliance! A huge thanks to our alliance partners, Quack Attack, Tech-No Tigers, and Blue Twilight, and congrats to Gators, KAOTIC, and Mystery Machine for their win and Blue Twilight for winning the Chairman’s award! Though we did not make it past quarterfinals, we gained valuable drive practice and have been working with our shadow-bot in the weeks following so that we can come back strong at Medtronic Foundation Regional!
We’re now preparing for the Medtronic Foundation Regional, which will be held at the Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota. The regional lasts from March 29th to March 31st, and you can keep up with us on The Blue Alliance livestreams as well as our twitter account.
10k was a wild ride. We played hard, worked hard, and definitely built hard. Unfortunately, we didn’t qualify for championships, but after ranking 19th with a 4-4-0 record we were the 9th pick for playoffs, which landed us on the 8th-seeded alliance with Blaze Robotics and QWERTY Robotics. Despite being the lowest-ranking alliance, we managed to secure a 2-0 win against the #1 seeded alliance! However, we went down in the semi-finals (again) due to our robot losing connection during a tiebreaker match.
Besides performing a lot better than we did at Northern Lights, we also won the Innovation in Control award for our spectacular shooting mechanism that made Omnibus the best shooter there. Those that weren’t busy building or programming presented for Chairman’s and Dean’s List and did extensive scouting throughout the matches. Also, ScotBot did a bit of dancing and we got a visit from our principal, Dr. Winston Tucker!
Videos of Omni in action can be found on our YouTube page. We’re currently planning a car wash on May 13th to raise money for next year, so stop by Highland from 9-2 if you want to support us (or if your car just needs a wash).
Thanks for keeping up with us!
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On bag day (or, for the non-robotics folk, February 21st) we finally completed our robot for this year and gave it a name. Meet Omnibus!
Omnibus gets its name from the fact that every component is stored inside of its box frame – besides being a name for a collection of books, omnibus is an adjective meaning “containing or including many items”. After the build process was complete, we programmed it and put it in a bag.
When we went to Northern Lights, our first regional of the year, it turned out Omnibus was slightly overweight. We had to cut a bunch of holes in its frame and get rid of some components, and because of that and our lack of drive practice, we didn’t get off to a great start. With some repairs to the robot, we managed to win 4 out of our 8 qualification matches, pulling ourselves up from last place to 28th place. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it past qualifications, but we learned a lot from the competition and made tons of improvements to our robot – and once we can legally take it out of the bag again, there’ll certainly be more to come.
We built a shadow-bot between competitions to test code and build new mechanisms, and since we can actually test on it and make adjustments, our outlook is even better than before. Our shooter mechanism can now get 21 kPa in autonomous mode – and it’s pretty dependable.
We’ve also made improvements to our gear catching mechanism and our climber using the shadow-bot. We’ve gone from a passive gear catcher – which just catches and delivers a gear – to an active gear catcher that can actually put the gear on the spring. We also let our drive team have some much-needed practice, so now we’re pretty proficient with our robot.
The business team has been working hard to perfect our presentation for the Chairman’s Award – for those not in the know, the Chairman’s Award is the most prestigious award a team can possibly win. It celebrates growth as a team and promoting STEM to one’s community. Along with that they have been working to get more sponsors to allow for more events in the near future.
That’s all for now! DFTBA!
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This year’s game is quite the challenge and since its release we have been hard at work on it. If you do not know about this year’s game you can see the game animation below along with updates about what we have been doing since kickoff!
Prototypes
We have put a lot of time and effort into our prototypes thus far and we will see that continue until at least the end of this week as we perfect them into mechanisms to go onto our chassis.
Gear Mechanisms
The first mechanism that we began working on is the mechanism to pick up and place gears. The original goal of this mechanism was not only to catch and carry the gear but also to do so from odd angles. The major reasoning behind such design choice was due to the fact that we want our cycle times to be as low as possible. Having a gear mechanism that can work within many ranges allows us to be within a wide margin of error which in turn allows for quicker turnaround and cycle times. Check out video of the mechanism prototype below.
ClimberMechanism
The climber is one of those mechanisms that we wanted to prototype as soon as possible. We feel that this mechanism has a high value and will set teams apart while it also has the potential to decide crucial matches. One thing that we did take into account is that we can bring our own rope. With this being an option in this years game we believe that it can easily be used to our advantage by designing the climber around a rope of our choosing. We also want it to be quick and sturdy as our robot needs to remain on the rope for the points to be valid. Check out some video below.
IntakePrototype
We have very recently begun design on our intake prototype. More information will come in a future post. For now, check out this video of last years robot intake on this years field elements. It surprisingly works pretty well.
Shooter Prototype
The shooter is a vital piece of our strategy. While it serves a seemingly simple task it can easily be one of the most complex things to prototype. We had a lot of thorough discussion as a team regarding our shooter. We realize that while it is important to be able to shoot from a fixed position it is also important to be able to do so rapidly and consistently. It is still an ever evolving prototype and we will keep you updated on its progress.
That’s all for now! DFTBA!
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Just wanted to give everyone an update about what is going on with HP Robotics and how we did at the Lake Superior Regional out in Duluth, MN. To summarize things, we did really well. This was our best regional thus far in terms of our accomplishments.
After the qualification matches we ended up in Rank 16 which meant to move on to playoffs we needed to be picked by another team that was in the top 8. We graciously accepted an invitation to join team 2538 – The Plaid Pillagers – and team 4531 – STEMpunk – in Alliance number 6 which allowed us to go on to playoffs. We ended up having to bow out in semifinals due to robot malfunctions, but we were still very excited to make it that far. After all was said and done we ended up in Rank 3rd overall.
Along with ranking as high as we ever had before we ended up winning the creativity award sponsored by Xerox. This officially sealed the deal as our best and funnest regional yet. We still have one more regional to go and expect a post soon with more information on that.
In the meantime – DFTBA
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Aaah! It’s been so busy we forgot to post updates. Sorry about that, we will try to make post more frequently. Now on to the information you all want to hear.
Stop build day is coming up! To be more exact it is February 23rd. That means that our robot has to be completely done and placed in a bag for our first competition in Duluth. We have made great progress on our robot and we will slowly release more information about our robot as it is being completed.
Today we present the information about our chassis!
The chassis is rolling with 12″ wheels which are attached by #35 chain and are in Tank Drive via 4 CIM motors and Vex Pro Gear Boxes.
Here goes some photos and even a video of the chassis in action.
Our shooter mechanism can now get 21 kPa in autonomous mode – and it’s pretty dependable.
