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Build Season Update and Scrimmage Info

Posted on by Shocking Shanty

A lot of progress has been made over the past week here in the Pirates’ Cove! All of the sub-teams have been hard at work. The climber sub-team is almost finished and after many revisions, the climber is mounted on the robot! The game-piece management team is working towards finished on their mechanism, and for the first time ever, we are working on a build book! The build book will be in our pit at competition, and be a sort of scrapbook of our build season. Programmers have been making huge amounts of progress with vision, getting us set up to use AprilTags this season!

We held our second Jr. Robotics lesson in the new shop this morning, with 11 junior engineers in attendance. They watched the kickoff video and tried to figure out how they would have solved the problem, then they built their own robots out of Lego. Afterwards they made paper-mâché starfish to decorate our pit at comp!

Scrimmage will be held at Corvallis High School on the 16th of February, time is to be determined, stay posted for updates! Teams from all over the state will be at scrimmage, running practice matches and getting some crucial drive practice in. The event will be open to the public, and the Scalawags hope to see you there!

Build Season Update, 15 Days In

Posted on by Shocking Shanty

The first two weeks of build season have been extremely productive for the Scalawags. We have been hard at work five days a week in the shop, prototyping, building and testing components for our robot for the 2025 game, Reefscape.

The first two days were all hands on deck for brainstorming, deciding how we want to play this game and getting broad ideas for how exactly we would score points. The team split into sub groups for designing game piece handling and climbing, two major components of the game.

We had two great ideas for game piece management. Two subgroups were formed to further prototype and research those ideas, while a third team set to work on the climbing mechanism and a fourth group got to work on designing our logo for the year and other imagery things.

The team came together and voted as a group on which game piece handling mechanism we wanted. Then we dove into production and manufacturing, with our art team and programmers hard at work to make sure that everything comes together for a functioning robot and an incredible pit for competition.

Open House Update

Posted on by Shocking Shanty

On Saturday the team hosted an open house in our new shop, The Pirates’ Cove. We opened our doors during the afternoon for community members, sponsors and alumni to come and check out our new space. More than 100 people came by and toured our space, bought some ScalaSwag and raffle tickets and enjoyed snacks. We made a little over $500 in Swag sales and raffle tickets! Many thanks to all of the businesses who made donations for the raffle! Items from HNB House, Makers Studio, J&C BBQ, Oregon Indoor Shooting Range, Tremls Jewelry, Strawberry Shop, Bloom, Camilla’s Candles, Swings & Vines, Windswept Designs, Blessed Tree Massage, K&G, Lebanon Art Guild and Chelsea’s Craft Shack were raffled off.

The 2025 Competition season starts very soon, and we are still in desperate need of sponsors. If you or someone you know wants to support STEAM learning in your community (and have your logo on our robot) reach out to us at frcteam1359@gmail.com for more information!

The Scalawags have found a new home!

Posted on by Shocking Shanty

After six long years of searching, the Scalawags have finally found a new shop. Students, mentors and parents spent several days moving all of our things out of the old shop and into our new, downtown home. The team met and named our new shop The Pirate’s Cove. Move in finished on November 23, now all that remains is to get everything unpacked and organized in time for build season! We will be hosting an open house in our new shop space on December 21 from 1-4 PM. Sponsors, interested students, and anyone else who wants to come and see what we’re all about is welcome to come on down to 605 S Main Street, on the corner of Ash and Main.

Build Season Begins

Posted on by Dirtylocks Dory

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.

Build-A-Thon

Posted on by CapnBlueberry

Kickoff is just around the corner, no time like the present to show your support! We will be hosting a Build-A-Thon where you can pledge support to a team member, by doing so you agree to donate a specific amount of money per hour the team member works, or you could make a flat donation, anything helps! We estimate needing $150 per student including things such as travel and hotel rooms, and this is just for the first two competitions, we need more if we make it to districts.