Hello!
An exciting new season of FRC is upon us, and we have been extremely busy preparing the team for it.
The first major change of this year is that we will be building two identical robots- one for testing and one for competition. At the end of our build season, our competition bot will have to be bagged, but we will be free to continue testing and refining our code on its identical copy.
This is possible thanks to our many new community sponsors who have given us an incredible amount of support over the past couple months! A few of those companies sent us new mentors with great experience in CAD and machining, and others hosted team field trips for us to see what STEM is like in the work force. I’d also like to give a huge thank you to our Treasurer, Trudie Effron, for reaching out to all of these organizations over countless phone calls and emails. She worked tirelessly to help us raise the money for the second set of parts, and it absolutely couldn’t have happened without her. Thank you Trudie!
Our team is also changing in other ways. For the first time since our head mentor Ryan McMonigle took over the team 8 seasons ago, we attended offseason events hosted by other teams. These competitions gave our new members a chance to see what it is that we are building towards and how exactly competitions run. The first competition was the Mahoning Valley Robotics Competition (MVRC), which took place on June 30th. Our second event was one hosted by the Center of Robotics Innovation (CORI) on September 30th. It was at this event that our team finished as a finalist, losing 2-1 in the final series of the event. This is the highest place our team has achieved at an event and is a great sign for our future!
In May of 2018, the Flying Circuits joined the NorthEast Ohio FIRST Robotics Alliance (NEOFRA) in a partnership of knowledge and resources with 9 other teams in our area. I have gained valuable information from the experience of these teams, and I look forward to talking about the new challenge and all of its strategies with them. Oh, and they dug up this old video of our team participating in a robot rube goldberg machine. It gave us an awesome glimpse at the past of our team!
And finally, our team plans to attend a scrimmage in the last week of the build season. I have yet to firm up the details on this but it will be an awesome opportunity to test the robots ahead of our two major events, the Miami Valley Regional from March 6-9 and the Greater Pittsburgh Regional from March 20-23.
That about wraps it up for our kickoff update! I think that with all of these accomplishments and all of those to come, we really have held true to our old motto:
Better than last year, better than ever.
-Jake Marchewitz, President of Team 1787