FRC Team 1359
wags had a blast competing in a Week 1 event the past couple days. We were fortunate to bring home a Spirit Award, AND come in third place. We narrowly missed a shot at the finals, but were very happy with how our little robot, Siren’s Song, performed. The team even had time to hit the pool Friday night in the hotel!
We are already back in the shop today, getting ready for our next event this coming weekend in Salem.
Ghostwritten by Mandarin Man
We’ve been busy in the shop, and our robot is coming together! We are figuring out intake and climbing. And we have our shooter ready. To test it, we have built a speaker machine to test its accuracy.
Ghost Written by Bucko Briiz and the Orange Man
This year, the game is “Crescendo.” We have to build a robot to pick up the game piece, which is an orange foam ring, called a note. The robot needs to be able to pick up the rings, which are scattered around the field or obtained from a human player. The human player then loads a game piece through a chute, dropping it on the floor or going directly into a robot. The robot then is to either launch it into the speaker or put it into the amp. The speaker is essentially the main goal, score points here by launching the ring into the opening. Place a note into the amp to “Amplify” the speaker, scoring extra points for a brief duration of time.
Now, what has the team been up to? Well, to start, after kick-off, we sat down as a team to begin brainstorming possible ideas for our robot. For the next few days, we continued brainstorming until we had a general idea for our robot. After we had our ideas, we broke off into subgroups to plan the different parts of the robot. Upon reaching a conclusion, we began prototyping. However, we were interrupted by a huge ice storm, costing us 24 hours that we could’ve been working in the shop. Luckily, half the team met in Zoom to plan what we would do after the ice melted. When we returned to the shop, we continued prototyping and started working on the base. We finished the base and made a functioning prototype of the shooter. We are still prototyping intake as of now.
This past March 2-4th, went up to Clackamas for a riveting competition! We struggled to get our sea legs out from under us and effectively move field pieces. Yet in typical Scalawag Spirit we cheered on ourselves and others, and received the Spirit Award! We learned and grew (and danced the YMCA a lot), and are currently working on improving our original design to bring to the Salem Competition this coming March 23-25th!
The Team has been hard at work building a robot this season. As of right now, our new flagship has its frame, arm our grabber. Right no built our main obstacles are programming portion, and jamming all of our components in our small frame. The scalawags might make history by giving our programmers a working prototype before scrimmage in Corvallis.
On Martin Luther king jr. day, the Scalawags continued the annual tradition of going around the high school and cleaning up trash. We have been making an effort to be more sustainable from seasons past, by using then washing, cups, plates, and cutlery.
Ghost written by a Ghost writer.
We have been away from the website updates for too long! Needless to say, we’ve been busy. Over the summer, the team ran car washes, can drives, and concessions on our local train line to bring in funds for the 2023 season. We also added many new members to our rank – including two new mentors! (Well, they’ve been lurking as parents for a while, but now they HAVE to hang out with us!) The team was also honored to be chosen as the Grand Marshal for the Twilight Holiday Parade here in Lebanon. Creating a 30 foot float with moving skeletons on vacation was a great way to build skills for our new members. Winning the Santa’s Choice award was icing on the cake!
The biggest news, of course, is our 2023 Build Season! We received our new challenge this past Saturday, and the team has been hard at work brainstorming ever since. If you missed the reveal, you can check out the game here . Charged Up is going to be a fast game with an unbalanced ending!
Pirate Ghostwriter
Hello!
We have some fun things to update you on. We have got our swerve drive built and are in the process of getting it put into a frame. We will be practicing with it when we finish the frame and coding so our drive team can gain experience with it. We have NEW members. Our team is up to 22 members now which is super exciting. We have done some fundraisers recently like car washes in the Lebanon High School parking lot and sold popcorn on the Santiam Excursion Train. We went to the Art and Air Festival in Albany with SWARM (957) which was a lot of fun. We were happy that we got invited to go with them. THANKS SWARM !
Scalawags will be washing (and drying) cars for FREE on Saturday, July 30, from 1 – 4. Look for us in the LHS parking lot, near the track entrance. Donations are gladly accepted – and we’re looking to take your redeemable cans and bottle off your hands, too!
In June, the Scalawags opened the doors of their shop to the community and prospective crew members. We were thrilled to have a good showing – including to alumni who dropped in to see what we’ve been up to! It was extra special to see those who have moved from the team to the “real world” talking with students thinking of joining us.
While our guests milled around and talked to everyone, we were still working on our swerve drive construction, writing code for that drive, and driving our 2022 ‘bot, Amelia. If you missed the open house, but would like to see what we’re all about, stop in and see us some time. We work most Wednesdays from 6:30 – 8 in our shop in the 700s building at the back of the LHS campus.
If you haven’t heard already, the Scalawags are kind of a big deal! We had an incredible journey at our most recent competition in Salem! The robot was solid and the drive team was consistent, but bad luck in alliance partners seemed to plague us. We went into alliance selection ranked 26th our of 28 teams.
However, Third Alliance Captain Team 7034 (TBD out of West Linn) and their partner 4488 (Shockwave) saw something in us and asked us to join them. Together, we crushed the competition – even after a shredded belt had us repairing as we wheeled to the field – and came out on top! Our third ever winners’ banner! Don’t be fooled by the photos of the drive team after the final match – those are tears of joy!
In addition, the team picked up a spirit award. The combination of these awards, plus our imagery award and role as Eighth Alliance Captain in Wilsonville propelled us to District Championship in Cheney, WA this week.
The team has been hard at work, repairing Amelia, preparing some new imagery, and practicing slurping and shooting balls. We leave Wednesday morning and could not be more excited! If you would like to cheer us on, matches start Thursday, April 7th at 4! You can catch the live stream here.
