Saints robotics will resume activity this Friday (May 14th), due to the fact that AP testing will be done by then. Since the team now only has one month left of the school year, we'll need to step it up quite a bit.

IB tests will not interfere will the club activities, as there are not so many people taking them. It is completely understandable, however, to not go to robotics during this time.

Time to turn things up a notch, Saints.

First and foremost, happy Mother's Day! We appreciate all of your love and hard work.

Monday will mean the second week of AP and IB testing has come upon us. Saints Robotics is in a state of emergency: there are no meetings for this following week. Fortunately for almost everyone, the testing period will be over soon enough. Unless, of course, you are an IB student and have to take a series of late AP exams during the week of the 18th...

The button machine is here! The graphics team has been hard at work, with three projects going at once. It was fortunate that we had five designs finished before today, and we were able to test out the machine immediately. There are still some details to work out (image tweaking, learning to use the machine...), but once those are fixed, we'll have a post-AP button making party!

It has quieted down in Saints Robotics since the build season, but there is still work to be done. In the post-competition weeks, we decorated the display case across from Mr. Cooney's room, assigned new leadership, and planned for next year.
The Wednesday after the regional, we had a huge post-mortem discussion. We filled up almost a dozen slides with notes for past failures, future wins, spirit and pit ideas, and more. Hopefully, we'll get most of the non-build tasks finished before graduation and at the beginning of this year to give more focus to actually building the robot during the 2009 season.

We have not uploaded any of the photos yet, but we have, in fact, come back from the Microsoft Seattle Regional mostly alive. It was wild and crazy, and like the announcer said, something of a "Cinderella story." Almost everything that could go wrong did, and we ended up walking off the field with medals. Pity? Fluke? Maybe I should recall the story...

We were working on "upgrade parts" before we got to the regional. We built new steering wheels, calibrated them, and built them in a way that allows us to mount them quickly. We also got a replacement gearbox with a wheel, just to switch out one of the wheels.

Here we are at the competition! We arrived early this morning and started unpacking our robot and fixing the wheels. The practice matches of the competition are about to begin! OMg. We are very pleased to have wireless internet, courtesy of the SSID gtctc so we can update our site in real time. (We also have Rubik's cubes.)

Just a few short days, and Spring will be upon us, along with the Microsoft Seattle Regional! Everyone's looking forward to it, and we've managed to probably more than double our attendance rate from last year, which might make us seem less like a joke and more like serious business.

I spent a while organizing all our stuff (other people helped sort bolts, metal, spacers, and terminals) only to put most of it in boxes that we're bringing to the competition. Oh well, at least everything is organized, right? Speaking of organization, Saints Robotics is going to re-organize for next year. The current structure we have is pretty good, but it's very difficult to get everyone organized all at once.

Team members pose with their new shirts.

We recently got our order of shirts, just in time for the competition.

Meanwhile, at the meetings, we are making final preparations for the competition-packing parts, organizing nuts and bolts, getting paperwork done. We've also made replacement steering wheels just in case ours break.

Six more days until the Microsoft Seattle Regional! We'll see you there!

It's been quiet around these parts lately. The build season is over, and club attendance rates have dropped dramatically. Spring sports have also started, and the female IB/robotics kids needing a physical education credit (Mary) have taken this opportunity to join Badminton. Here's to a winning season. There's been nobody to write articles, and, quite honestly, nothing to write about. There are competitions happening these weeks, nay, right now (maybe), but we are not part of them.

We are allowed to build spare parts for our robot while in this inter-ship-and-competition period, and have taken advantage of this time to order some new gearboxes. We suffered catastrophic drive failure on a consistent basis during the 2007 Pacific Northwest Regional, and intend to have replacement parts should something happen to the wheels. We received our gearboxes this past weekend, but something was wrong.