Who Are We?

When the FRC game, Breakaway, was released, our team had great ideas, but a full strategy was not agreed on. We did know we would be a defensive robot, and tried to keep the robot as simple as possible. Prototyping was not our strong point that year. It would take us a week before we would be done with the prototyping. So, no prototypes got made, and the design meeting was nothing but sketches. This really wasn't the best way to design a robot.

Meanwhile, for the first time ever, our team and a couple of other teams from the area built a full-sized practice field in a warehouse in Lynnwood. The field had all the right sized goals, bumps, and towers that we could use to practice controlling our robot on, and we invited all the local teams to also use it. Even though there wasn't a lot of time from when the robot was ready to drive to when it had to be shipped it was good to have something more than a few square feet in the shop to practice on.

In the end, we designed a pretty good defensive robot. We had a powerful kicker that could boot a soccer ball halfway across the fieldand over some of the bumps. When we got to the competition, though, the kicker had some problems. So, sometimes stuff happens and you have to figure out a quick solution. We could still push balls around but our strength was playing defense. Maybe it wasn't what we originally set out to do but we were able to do something to help our alliances.

At the Portland regional we placed in the middle of the pack, which was not too bad, but didn't get selected for the elimination tournament. At Seattle, we had very unlucky qualification matches, placing 62 out of 64 teams; also didn't get selected for the elimination tournament, but we were listed as the 5th pick for one of the top ranked teams. Sadly for us, they were able to choose their higher picks.

However, at Seattle, we won the safety award, Emilie Woog won the Seattle nomination for the Dean's List award, and we also won the Entrepreneurship award for our business plan.

More than we've ever done before, Frank developed a way for students and mentors to scout other teams at the competition. There were about a dozen different things recorded each time an individual robot went into each qualification match. He took all this information, gathered in shifts by the whole team, and logged the results in a spreadsheet to have hard data to support choices for the elimination tournament.

At first the idea was, "Why do we need to do this?" but the result was that we became the 5th choice on one of the top team's list of possible alliance partners BECAUSE of our scouting reports. We learned that the robot isn't the only thing that ranks you for being part of an alliance. There are a lot of other - sometimes seemingly meaningless- things that are just as important. We learned that the picture is sometimes a whole lot bigger than what we think it is; it's not JUST about the robot.

After this year, we had learned a lot about ourselves, and how to better go about designing a robot, and how massive a scouting program can be.

Our team was fairly small that year as many of our members had graduated. We got the word out and managed to grab a large number ( 6 or 7 ) of freshmen to join the team and keep MTHS Robotics strong.

The biggest challenge that year was the new field for the Lunacy challenge. Our team now officially hates FRP (fiberglass reinforced plastic) board. The lower amount of friction caused by this unique field composition really made designing a robot hard even for a veteran team. We managed to do really well and designed a robot that wasn ]t too greatly affected by the low friction surface.

We competed in our usual two regionals, Portland and Seattle. We did pretty well at both venues but were not picked for the final alliances at Seattle. At Portland however, we were! Unfortunately we had to decline the offer.

At both venues we suffered catastrophic programming failure and at Portland we had to decline because our robot failed to operate. The problem was later solved and we went on to Seattle and had more problems. It was a frustrating year for Chill Out.

Despite the disasters we learned a lot from that year. The new playing surface was one of the biggest challenges and we defeated it, adding more to our engineering expertise. Programming of course learned what the problem was and it should never happen again. Next year will of course work even better!

Wednesday February 13th 2008. From today, we have exactly one week to ship the robot. This season started very well. The concept of simplicity was spinning around everybody's heads and this year was the first year we did something different. Instead of taking two and a half weeks to design and prototype, the student body decided to design and prototype a robot by the first week. Then we would hand over the hand drawn sketches to our designers and they would generate an AutoCAD design for us. This concept actually worked out great. Although the design review was very hectic and irritating the team came out in one piece.

Apart from the fact of building quick this year, we had gotten Lynnwood High School which is a neighboring school in our district to start a robotics team. When we went there to recruit, we had about 15 people interested, of those 15, three or four came regularly. We also got Dan Terry to donate 80/20 material which was very fascinating to work with and made life a lot easier.

Two legendary mentors had joined our team this year, Brad Nelson and Ray Gibbs. We appreciate these two mentors for taking their time to help and encourage students in science and technology. We have learned lots of "life skills " from these mentors.

The 2008 robot has the same concept as the 2007 robot but with major changes in design. Unlike lifting an object vertically from the front of the robot, we have decided upon a robot which lifts a 40" diameter, 10 pound ball from the front but now has a 63 degrees angle tilt. Essentially, our robot is a giant triangle. The cascading arm is lifted with a lead screw and the carriage is being mechanically driven. The tilt mechanism is run by a globe motor.

Our first competition for the season was the Oregon Regional in Portland.

We secondly attended the Microsoft Seattle Regional in Tacoma. We went into it with our spirits high and ready to win. We lost our first match to the rookie team that we mentored , Lynnwood High School Royals. Once the match was over we congratulated them and then we realized we needed to just pick our heads up and keep on moving with a positive attitude. And that’s what we did and by doing so that was the only match we lost that day. We walked out of the arena that day with the record 7-0-1 and ranked 1st on the leader boards. We were all jumping for joy as this was the first time we were the top ranked team at this point in the game.

The 2007 season felt like a trade off for us. We had one person who resigned as a teacher but simultaneously other mentors had joined. Scott Lindley had found a job as a Product Engineer so he couldn't spend as much time with us as he wanted. In return, Kevin Crader, Jeff Stone, Andrew Nicholson, Mr. and Mrs. Burkett, Mr. Wilson and Rod Schein had joined our team! These fantastic mentors helped out a lot! From the previous year, we had Mr. and Mrs. Jonsrude. Jeff Stone and Rod Schein were experienced in electrical, while Mr. Wilson, Mr. Jonsrude, Mr.Crader and Mr. Burkett in mechanical fabrication. Andrew helped us out in programming. He also brought the whole team to reality with his mad skills in physics. Heidi Burkett helped us out in all aspects of the team but mainly in Spirit. We want to personally thank all mentors for their help!

At our first design meeting, we came up with all the possible ways we can score and our priorities. We had many great ideas regarding the end effecter which will "pick up" the inner tube and place it on the rack. The end effecter combined with a very simple ramp idea lead us to a great design. We called the end effecter, the Cascading Arm. The only problem with the Cascading Arm was that we tried to do too many things with it. In other words, we would use the arm and cascade to 3 positions, the lower, the middle, and the top. While we were engineering the cascading arm, we found that it was drawing too much current and the battery didn't have enough juice to raise the arm up more than two times. The easiest way to solve this problem, unfortunately we couldn't, was to design the arm so that it only went to the lower and the middle rack. By the way, guess when we found our error? The day before our robot got shipped to the Portland Regional.

The team had to take a dramatic course of action, so we decided to ditch the arm and become an all out defensive robot with a ramp. By luck, there were only a few teams that could lift the robots up 12 inches from the field, so our team was watched closely by other teams. We had won many matches just because of our ramp mechanism. That's primarily the reason why we got chosen by the 1st and 2nd ranked teams in Portland to be in the finals.

Our rookie year was probably the hardest year ever! We didn't know what to do, had no experience what so ever in any field, and were messing around most of the time. No one assigned anyone to project management, so it was a very hectic and fast moving environment. Students would come in, sit down, and wait for someone to tell them what to do. The funny part was that Scott Lindley, the founder of our team, used to get all hyper, and into the building, but as time passed during the day we would goof off and play around, as Scott was the center of the fabrication team he wound up coming over and barking at us; evidently, that barking actually strengthened our relationship with him.

We would spend hours on things that only needed minutes, we would drill holes in the wrong place and always, always were looking for the easiest way out, which lead us to an even harder situation. But in the midst of all these challenges, the 10-15 core students came together and constructed a fine robot that was actually "Pretty good looking as far as design and functionality." according to the judges and other teams at the competition. Everybody was blown away by the fact of us being rookies, with absolutely no experience, and still managing to build a cool robot. This led us to win the All Star Rookie Award which qualified us for the Championships in Atlanta, Georgia.

With limited man power, and a limited budget, we headed off to Atlanta. Of course, we didn't go there to win a metal, we actually went there to immerse ourselves in the full experience of FIRST. It was a tremendous opportunity! Abdur Rehman, the MTHS Robotics President at the time said, "I felt like I was amongst those teams who were the best of the bests, who probably did something significant to get this far." This was a great feeling. Although we didn't win anything in Atlanta, we harnessed great ideas, bonded, and experienced a whole new world of science and technology through FIRST Robotics.