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News — Add Comment
09
Mar 10

Congratulations on completing the San Diego Regional!

Congratulations to the team for finishing the San Diego regional! We did well: the judges awarded us the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award for our advanced software features, and we got a chance to show off all of the functions that we had originally planned for our robot.

We finally figured out the huge controllability problems that we’d been suffering from the whole competition–a combination of simple issues, such as a disconnected gear shifter motor. After discovering this, we instantly started scoring and driving responsively, and we could lift ourselves reliably! That allowed us to start winning qualification matches.

This was a really tough issue to fix, since we could never reproduce it in the pits or on the practice field. Thinking it was an elusive software bug, we made incredible optimizations to our code, and the software team is confident that we now have one of the fastest-running robot programs.

Now, our results: during our qualification rounds yesterday, we went 2 wins – 5 losses–primarily because of the gearbox issues. Today, we went 2 wins – 1 loss in qualifications. We were selected by the number 7 alliance, with teams 815 and 1332. Right away, we went up in a very tough quarter-final round against the 2nd and 3rd seed teams, and unfortunately lost 2 matches against them, ending the competition for us.

Despite running into some obstacles, our robot was successful at San Diego after fixing that controllability issue. Our systems generally work, and I was incredibly proud of our team, seeing that robot lift up–the crowd screamed!

–David Liu, Co-President

San Diego Regional Collage

Announcements / Projects — Add Comment
07
Mar 10

SVR Tasks

Hey team — both students and mentors!

We have a ton to do before Silicon Valley Regional, starting next Thursday, March 18. We have a good robot, but some parts still require tuning and we can always improve our performance. We also really need to practice driving, and to do that we have to reassemble the practice robot!

If you’d like to help out please put your name down on the following spreadsheet and select the dates that you’d be available. (We won’t ask you to come on every day that you check–we just need to coordinate people’s schedules.)

https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/iceboundflame.com/viewform?formkey=dDBnTTVHYmVoTkFEWmJUWDdJRWF0ZUE6MA

Tasks that need to be done:

  • Putting on wheels
  • Experiment with roller for better ball control
    • Install the roller on the practice robot.
    • We’re thinking of switching out the roller for a foam noodle
    • Need to calculate the correct speeds for the roller based on the robot’s motion.
  • Get room 608 for practice
  • Machine parts and assembling a new lift using updated design
  • Install the kicker on the practice robot.
  • Experimenting with kicker damping to protect from “dry firing”
  • Test autonomous mode
  • Install proximity sensor to detect the ball, or design a new ball detection sensor.

It’s a lot of work for a week and a half, but if we concentrate our efforts on working efficiently, I really think we can do this. This means that each day at the garage, we should go in with a plan to accomplish one of these tasks, and finish the night at a reasonable hour.

Let’s go win SVR!

News — Add Comment
14
Feb 10

Robotics Members Succeed in Speech and Debate

While most members of Lynbrook Robotics have been busily working on the current Breakaway game since January, several members have also attended and succeeded at a few major tournaments in Speech and Debate.

This past weekend, February 6th and 7th, several Lynbrook Robotics team members competed in one of the largest high school speech and debate tournaments in the nation. The Stanford Invitational brought together over 1,500 students from all over the country. Vice President Chinmay Jaju took 1st place in Expository speech, beating out nearly 60 other competitors. Chinmay has always done well in this event, placing highly in other competitions, but he finally broke through this weekend after giving sensational speeches about Villains, appropriately mixing excellent presentation skills, astounding visual aids, and beautiful rhetoric.

In Parliamentary debate, modeled after the British Parliamentary system, two LRT members advanced into elimination rounds. This was the largest division of Parliamentary Debate ever in a high school tournament, with over 110 teams entered into the pool. This meant that teams needed to achieve a record of 4-2 or better with a great quality of consisting speaking ability. Parliamentary Debate is unique among debate events because teams only get the topics 20 minutes before the debate begins, and competitors must be well versed in current global affairs. Webmaster Karthik Viswanathan and his partner, Ruicong Yan, advanced to elimination rounds placing in the top 32. Veteran member Aditya Majumdar, and his partner, Indranil Bora, also advanced to double octafinals (top 32 teams) after having been the 9th seed and advancing to late elimination rounds in 2009 as well. These two teams were among 6 Lynbrook teams to advance out of preliminary rounds, setting a tournament record.

Three weeks ago, a few of these members also attend the James Logan Invitational in Union City. This tournament drew over 1000 competitors as well, with competitors flying in from 7 states, and with over 100 entries in each event. In Parliamentary Debate, rookie member Elliot Young advanced to Double Octafinals with his partner, Anjana Rao. This is an excellent achievement as it was Elliot’s first varsity tournament of this size! Aditya Majumdar narrowly missed advancing in Parliamentary Debate by just one rank. He did advance to Quarterfinals in Impromptu Speaking, and won 9th place in National Extemporaneous speaking; both of these events involve severely limited preparation time and necessitate quick thinking.

Please congratulate these students for their successes while handling both programs concurrently!

- Aditya

Meeting Minutes — Add Comment
09
Feb 10

Meeting Notes – Feb 9, 2010

Officers Present: David Liu, Annie Yang, Toshitaka Tachibana, Yuya Bessho, Steve Hatton, Yusuke Sato, Karthik Viswanathan, Brandon Liu, Karena Cai, Alric Siu

Advisors Present: Mr. G
Officers Absent: Haochuan Ni, Manami Yokoyama, Eric Jan, Chinmay Jaju

Guests: Edward

The meeting was called to order at 7:09 pm.

Hey Everyone,

These are topics we discussed in this meeting:

Continue reading →

Meeting Minutes — Add Comment
04
Feb 10

Meeting Notes – Feb 2, 2010

Officers Present: David Liu, Annie Yang, Chinmay Jaju, Toshitaka Tachibana, Yuya Bessho, Steve Hatton, Yusuke Sato, Karthik Viswanathan, Manami Yokoyama, Brandon Liu, Eric Jan

Advisors Present: Mr. G
Officers Absent: Haochuan Ni, Alric Siu, Karena Cai

Guests: Normand

The meeting was called to order at 7:11 pm.

Hey Everyone,

These are topics we discussed in this meeting:

  • Old Business
    • Awards
      • Get third person to proofread it
      • After Thursday we should have some proofread-able stuff
    • Photojournal
      • Toshi and Annie went yesterday
      • Finished putting in most of the pictures
      • Need to finish in the next two weeks
      • For captions, we need to get input from the members
      • Only have 2 meetings to get that input
      • Plan: have people edit it on their own at the meeting to attract attention, also have a packet with all the pictures so people can write comments there too
    • Chairman’s Award DVD
      • Worked on it yesterday
      • Either have someone talking and have pictures in the background, or have someone talk about the video
      • Will work on that Thursday and Sunday
    • Haiti Fundraiser
      • Talked to office
      • There’s an exception for Haiti
      • Need to make a table for people who want to donate
      • Money based on how much our alliance scores
      • Eric will run this
      • Eric- make the pledge sheets
      • What will the motivation be?
      • Why would people want to try to collect prizes?
      • Maybe have an inter-team competition- all the teams earn money for Haiti, send us totals, then we announce winner and recognize teams who participated
      • But what’s in it for them?
      • Why should they send the money to us?
      • We need something a bit more direct
      • We can be a model for other teams- inspire them to do the same
      • To do that, we need to earn money ourselves
      • How?- have incentives? (might lose money? Or “break even” which makes it pointless)
      • Estimated amount of money we’ll raise: $4000
      • Goal: ?
      • Have a cap- max amount of money the person will give
      • Have the option to just pay also
      • Will recognize the top fundraisers (motivation)
      • We also need to submit a fundraiser form to ASB
      • Iris- fill out those forms
    • Practice Room
      • The email was not effective
      • Maybe ask Ms. Davidson to request a room in person at one of the Wednesday morning teacher meetings
      • Get the teachers to understand our program so they won’t think it’s just extra useless work- email didn’t convey that
    • T-Shirt
      • Ms. Reller refuses to let us use yellow
      • Now our choices are: red (like the Senior shirt), teal (like YAK)
      • Choices for fabric: polyester, cotton
      • Red: 7
      • Blue: 3
      • Winner: Red
      • Polyester: 5
      • Cotton: 3
      • Abstain: 2
      • Winner: polyester
      • Final: Red polyester T-shirts
    • Yearbook Pictures
      • Rescheduled to this Wednesday (tomorrow)
      • After the meeting we’ll all walk over to the Cove together
      • Wear team shirt or black/dark blue
      • Send reminder tonight
      • Abhinav- bring banner
      • Mr. G- bring mascot (someone call him to remind him)
      • Need to find someone to wear the mascot
    • San Diego
      • New week 8PM will have an information meeting
      • Discuss the information packet
      • Paid for our tickets today
      • If someone really really wants to go, they might be able to go
      • Most likely not, but the tickets haven’t been issued yet so there might still be a chance.
    • Winter Newsletter
      • Many grammatical errors
      • Everyone can contribute to this
      • Need proofreaders
      • Everyone- edit newsletter
    • SchoolLoop
      • David- post the link
    • Website
      • Now members are sorted by paid and unpaid and they’re ordered alphabetically
      • Now members can post announcements- using a guest account
      • Need to make sure they know the difference between News and Announcements
      • News- significant accomplishments
      • Announcements- “Meeting Minutes”
      • Have Latest Updates section instead of Active Announcements
      • Use less technical words (ex: archive)
    • Bumper
      • Silk screening (talk to art teacher about it), Screen printing, Spray painting, Painting
      • Two sets of bumpers or a cover
      • Two bumpers seem easier to deal with
  • New and Upcoming Business
    • Special Meeting Minute Page for Build Season Log
      • Annie- post Build Season log
    • Electronics Orders
      • Will have to take it out
      • Spent a lot of money already
    • Attendance
      • People are coming late
      • Start the meeting at 7, if people are late, they will miss the beginning of it
  • Important Dates:
    • Feb 18th- Chairman’s (DVD, essay), Website, Woodie Flowers Award
    • Feb 23rd- Ship Day
    • Mar 3rd- Regional, Entrepreneurship Award


The meeting was adjourned at 9:10 pm.

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