Blog

The animation team began making a game for this year's vex animation challenge.

The rules of the animation challenge are: http://forum.robotevents.com/design/challenge/detail/94

Here are the rules to our game:

http://team254.com/images/stories/the%20field.png

There are small tops upside down on the field in 4 circles of 6 with a large top in the middle of each circle. There are 4 more large tops on posts on walls. There are two goals in the corners of the field on the floor. There are 4 cylindrical goals, 2 for each team, that small tops can be placed in for bonus points.

The tops can be scored in the corner goals for points by  rolling them in. There is a large covering over the corner goals to prevent scoring from above. To discourage descoring, there is a small ramp, 1" high and 4" long that will keep the tops inside the corner goal. However, descoring is completely legal.

The small tops can also be lifted and scored in cylindrical goals for additional points.

There is a bonus piece as well. A 5 lb weight is placed in the center of the field and can be lifted onto the corner goal for a point bouns within the last 30 seconds of the match.

Dimentions of pieces:

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

small tops:  4"

big tops:  6"

dumbell: We'll make it 5 lbs.

cylindrical goal: 4" wide 12" tall

Scoring:

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

small top in a corner goal.  2pts

big top in a corner goal.  5pts

small top in a cylindrical goal. TBD

dumbell on a floor goal.  TBD

This past weekend, the Bellarmine Robotics Team 254 once again stretched itself to the limit, entering two separate tournaments 3,000 miles apart.  At Fairfield, CA, 4 Bellarmine VEX Robotics teams competed in the 2nd annual Vanden High VEX Regional, waking up early for a 2 hour drive on Saturday morning. That afternoon, after several qualification matches which pinned Bellarmine teams against those of other schools in the Bay Area, the Cheesy Poofs came out as first seed, picking a second Cheesy Poof team in the alliance that eventually won the tournament, undefeated. Across the Pacific Ocean, three more 254 teams competed at the second largest VEX Robotics tournament in the world in Hawaii, the Pan Pacific VEX Championship, second only to the World Championship.  After a tough set of qualifications and 36 hours of continuous repairs on their robots, one of the the Cheesy Poof teams managed to seed third in their division.  Just like at Fairfield, this team selected another Bellarmine team along with team 2438B from Hawaii and fought through two divisions and 112 teams from around the world to win the championship.  After this successful weekend, Bellarmine successfully defended its winning titles at both tournaments for the second year in a row.

Last week a meeting was scheduled for Thursday, but not enough people showed up, so it didn't happen.

I have personally contacted everyone on the team to remind them of their assignments and the meetings.

Today was Team 254's first of three CAD Fridays. After a fun team lunch, we had over twenty team members come together at the NASA lab to learn CAD skills.

We started out with an introduction to SolidWorks and went into some of the skills used in basic extruded features and sketches. We discussed sketch relations and dimensioning and made several simple parts.

Later, Travis gave a presentation on the Fundamentals of Graphic Communication, which can be found here. The presentation was long, but went very well and was extremely informative. All who attended were able to learn about expressing three dimensional objects in two dimensions through engineering drawings as well as other valuable graphic communcation skills. Travis even showed the team one of his parts from his work and showed how many drawing views needed to be used to effectively communicate the part's design.

After the presentation and dinner, we worked to develop our CAD skills by analyzing a pre-made engineering drawings and creating 3D CAD models of the parts based on the drawings. It was a good excercise for using the graphic communication skills we learned and applying them to actual design.

After the CAD was wrapped up, several team members stayed late at the lab and built shelves upstairs that can be used by our team and by team 1868 for storing and displaying our trophies and awards.

At the next CAD Friday (12/3), we will split into two teams and work on a design project, using SolidWorks to model our different solutions to the design challenge which will be announced. It should be a great way to continue to learn CAD skills through practice and problem solving.

After a strong few months of programming, the Zero Robotics team draws the season to an end. At the last competition, which took place at MIT on Friday the 12th, BCP Zero Robotics placed 3rd out of 8 teams in our bracket, but placed 11th out of the entire 24 teams. The cut off for the semi-final round was 10th place, knocking us out of the competition. Let's win it next year!

Johnathan Chang worked on the opening scene of the Saftey Animation.

Ryan Barekat finished the textures used on the main character's model.

Erik Anderson is composing the score for the animation.

For the week of November 8 to November 14 the submissions for archiving were submitted to me.

About half the team has responded with their info, and the other half has not contacted me.

I will talk to everyone on the team this week and I will shuffle assignments if necessary.

This September, we got a team of programmers together and applied to participate in an MIT and NASA sponsored competition called Zero Robotics. After a very difficult application process, we got accepted among 24 other teams out of over 100! Using an online simulator, our team met multiple times a week to develop strategies and code that would help us fulfill our mission efficiently, which is to search for a lost solar panel, and retrieve it back to our space station, all while avoiding other satellites. In a recent online "simulator" competition, our team took 12th out of 24 teams. There is an upcoming competition for which we recently submitted our code.