Last year, I went joined FIRST in anticipation of exiting filled with building robots. At first I was disappointed as this was our first year and the kick-off hadn’t occurred. But then the day came, and after sitting and eating donuts for a couple hours, the game had begun and the race was on. During the 6 week period, I learned many things. Things like, “Don’t Cut Flimsy Metal With A Powerful Saw” and “Coffee Is Good”. This is very true, as matter of fact. We had a metal toolbox we had planned to make our control box, but it was flimsy metal and the power tools we used on it were just too powerful for it. The same is true for coffee, I thought it to always be disgusting, until I took a drink, said it was good, then found out it was coffee. From then on, each meeting I was sure to make a fresh pot of coffee for everyone. Apart from the metal and coffee statements, building the robot was also a blast. We ran into many problems along the way, flaw in the design, malfunctioning programming, argumentative teammates, but in the end, it all came out well.

When got to the San Jose the day before the competition, we were surprised to find another team had sent us a gift bag. It was filled with little goodies, including 10 tickets to Great America. Although we didn’t get to use the tickets, we did make use of the food they supplied us. The next day at the competition, we didn’t know what to expect. We hadn’t seen the inside of the center until we walked in the door, carrying our equipment, and realized we had to walk a long way to our pit. But it wasn’t all bad. As a mater of fact, we got stationed next to Chief Delphi. They actually helped us out a few times, once when we needed a can of air, another when we realized that they thought one of our drills belonged to them. After a short quarrel on proving it was ours, they realized our names were on it, and they gave it back with a hearty smile and a “Sorry ‘bout that!”

The first day there we didn’t have a functioning robot. As a matter of fact, when we turned it on, it refused to move, and after several attempts at coaxing it to move forward, it retaliated by shorting out one of our victors. After replacing the victor and replacing the code with a more agreeable code, we tried again. This time, we had success, but a short lived one again. This time it moved forward about a foot, then smoked at us from a victor, then the battery died. As it turned out, the team member who was supposed to charge the batteries didn’t. Instead he had been wandering around the campus trying to pick up girls. After a quick lecture on responsibility and teamwork, he stopped the wandering and renewed his effort in the manipulation of the robots brain.

After we had remedied the problems, we had a moving robot. With one hour to go before our first match on the second day, we had to finish qualifying the robot. So we fit inside the box, easy enough. But, alas, we were 8 pounds overweight. We had a fat robot and had to make it lose weight. We took it back to the pits, where we began putting large holes where there was no equipment, then putting it into a bucket which we weighed every 10 or so minutes to see how much weight we had lost. Using his intelligence, our largest member said “Why not remove the Plexiglas?” So we did, and our robot had done what Jenny Craig could not. It lost 10 pounds in half-an-hour. We weighed and measured again, and we were in the game.

The first match came, and we lost horribly. We had placed on the robot two small fin-like things designed to help corral the balls. Our driver unknowingly placed them outside the arena about 15 times. Big loss, but we weren’t worried, it was fun. After returning to the pits, we removed the fins so that wouldn’t happen again. The next match went over very well. We scored big, but lost by a small amount. Each match afterwards was pretty much the same, we lost, we lost, we lost again, and then we had a breakdown. I believe our robot became depressed because of all the losses and at the beginning of the match, moved forward, but then decided it was no use. It stopped moving, and tipped over onto the side of the arena. As it turned out, the battery had died. But not because our battery man had neglected the batteries, the connections from wire to wire had come lose, and the battery itself did not get charged. We spent the next hour charging the battery and making a new code to make our lift move faster. After fixing the batteries, we made our first attempt to cap.

Our lift was very slow and never managed to grab the capping ball in time to cap. This time though, we did pick it up, and tried to cap. But our robot was too short and did not have enough clearance to make it partially up the stairs to cap. During the part where we lowered our lift to grab something else, Team 254 was making an attempt to hang. So we grabbed them. After a furious entanglement, we snapped their cable, and their robot fell about 6 inches onto the top of ours, bending part of our grabber. With no replacement parts, we couldn’t grab a single thing without it falling moments after we thought we had a hold. The games continued as usual, we lost, lost again, and the last much I missed. I was the human player this whole time, but whilst wandering about the campus during our downtime, the matches moved ahead of schedule. Just as I walked in 5 minutes before the match should have started, I hear the sound of the game beginning, and the words “And Team 1457 is now moving forward to grab the capper.” I rushed forward to discover I had missed the match by moments. After giving a thorough apology to the team, they forgave me, and life continued.

The day ended, and he awards ceremony was about and hour away. So we went and watched the NASA presentation on the mars rover. Very informative and very entertaining. The awards came, and we didn’t win anything. Some members of the group were sad, but I wasn’t. I had a great time, and that was an award to me. We packed up our things and left town, went home where we celebrated what had happened, and what didn’t.

In the end it gave me experience for this year, and plenty of fun little stories to tell my friends. So thanks to all of you who actually read this whole thing, I hope I didn’t bore you. And thanks to US FIRST for being in existence, and to our sponsors, and to all the other teams that participated.