This week was an exciting one for the AdamBots as we competed in the OCCRA Diversity Competition at Birmingham Groves High School yesterday. We ended up taking first place at the competition and winning the Spirit Award!

Leading up to the competition, our sub-teams were working hard as always.

The Build Team was very busy improving the robot and fixing all the bugs. We rewired the robot so that the hanging mechanism now works. We also got the pneumatics to work and fixed the coefficient of squish. In order to pick up balls at different levels of inflation, we added whiskers to the rollers to aid the pickup process. Also, in preparation for the diversity competition, we trained female drivers for our own robot and to help other teams as well.

In the Build Workshops this week we built the top frame of the showbot. We attached the base of the robot together, adding the transmissions. Furthermore, we looked at the basic controls of a robot, such as the battery, computer, and the other components that make the robot work. dscf3079

Programming met only briefly this week, and discussed various options for secondary computers on our robots, both for FIRST and for show robots. These would allow more flexibility and power in programming though represent a somewhat larger controls burden.

The Business Plan team developed a schedule for update configuration and created deadlines for completion.

The Marketing Team elected leadership positions for the sub-team to allow for greater efficiency in meeting deadlines in the future.

The Photo/Video Team met to discuss ideas for the Chairman’s video and beyond. We also talked about new videos to create for our Youtube, including a vlog we hope to begin releasing soon.

The main event of the week was, of course, the Diversity Competition at Birmingham Groves High School. We arrived there having performed below our expectations at the Waterford Kettering competition, and so we knew that making a winning comeback would be difficult. Our first match was an all-girl match, which we won 14-0 alongside Pontiac’s Team 51, Wings of Fire. We continued our success through the competition, winning all but 2 matches in total. One of these was a 12-12 tie and the other an 11-0 loss.

Once awards came, we were anticipating a placement in the rankings, but we were pleasantly surprised when it was announced that we had taken 1st place! We had 93 points. In 2nd was team 203 and in 3rd was our original partner, team 51, with 83 points!

We also won the Spirit Award at the competition, our first time this year. We were glad to win this award after a fun and exciting day of cheering and dancing and, of course, wearing crazy hats!

Next week there will be no competition for us since the Vex competition will be held. We’ll be back with the next Thursday competition in two weeks.

Stay tuned for AdamBots updates!

Written by Cameron Johnson

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