All posts by Emma

Championship, Skystone

NorCals 2020

In the beginning of March, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regional Championships with their sister team, ARES Robotics. This was the first time both teams would be attending the event together, so we were very excited!

NorCals is a competition between the 56 best teams in Northern California in San Jose. At the Championship, you compete for one of eight spots at the World Championship. It is a two day event, with judging and pit set up on the first day and matches, finals, and the award ceremony on the second day. Since ACME had been to Worlds the past two years, we were really just proud we had made it to NorCals and weren’t expecting to qualify for Worlds. 

Over the course of the weekend we had several highlights. Software and business judges came to talk to us after out judges presentation. We made repairs very quickly and managed to keep very positive attitudes. We won the majority of our qualification matches too, which was also good. 

We were not picked to be on an alliance for the finals. However, we did have a lot of fun watching the finals matches. 

Outreach

Nevada County Student Hackathon

ACME Robotics, in collaboration with Nevada County Tech Connection, is pleased to present the Nevada County Student Hackathon!

In this 8 hour, free event students in middle and high school will design and program a video game using Scratch, JavaScript, Python, or whatever coding language you prefer! Students will work as teams to finish the challenge. This event includes a introduction to programming workshop at the beginning of the day and no coding knowledge or experience is required! At the end of the day, teams will present their game and have the chance to win awards. Lunch will be provided. If you are interested, please register for this event by following the link below. We hope to see you there!

When: March 30, 2019

Time: 9 A.M. – 5 P.M.

For: Middle and High School students interested in programming (no experience required)

Where: 104 New Mohawk Dr. Nevada City, CA 95959

Registration: http://bit.ly/AcmeHackathon

Contact: goacmerobotics@gmail.com

Championship, Rover Ruckus

2019 Northern California Regionals

This past weekend, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regionals in San Jose, CA. Our goal was to qualify for the World Championship. After a long two days of judging, matches, and scouting, we were able to do just that. 

The Northern California Regionals span two days. 56 teams from the Northern California League, which spans from Bakersfield to the California – Oregon border, compete for eight spots of advancement to Worlds. These eight winners are the winning alliance (consisting of three teams), then 2nd place alliance captain, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place Inspire winners, and finally the Think award winner. That meant that we had to place high enough during the competition, or try to win Inspire or Think in order to qualify for the World Championship.

Judging and inspection began on Saturday and then match play on Sunday. Our judging presentation was at 4:30 in the afternoon on Saturday. Our judging presentation went very well! Then, we went and set up our pit area and took the robot to inspection (which we passed). 

Sunday started bright and early with opening ceremonies and qualification matches. ACME played matches throughout the day and won 3 out 5 of them, placing us at 15th out of 28 teams in our division. During alliance selection we were picked to be on the third seed alliance. 

During elimination rounds we made it to our division finals. This meant we were playing against the first seed alliance. They ultimately beat us, but it was very fun to compete in the finals.

Since we had not qualified through match play, we need to win one of the awards I mentioned above. As each award passed, we became more and more discouraged as we hadn’t been nominated for any. Then they announced the Think winner – and it was ACME Robotics!

We were so excited and ran down the bleachers to high-five all of the tournament officials, referees, and judges. The Think award winner had a guaranteed spot at the World Championship and we couldn’t believe we had received it!

The Think award is given for a team’s engineering notebook. You may not know this, but we have to document our design process throughout the year in the engineering notebook. We use a typesetting system called LaTeX (pronounced la-tech) that allows us to  professionally format our engineering notebook. Throughout the notebook, we have entries written by every member on our team about our design process, fabricating parts, testing code, putting on outreach events, and everything in between. We include drawings, diagrams, pictures, and code into our notebook so that everything has a good visual representation. 

We were so honored to have been given the Think award and are already planning our pit for the World Championship. Worlds is held in Houston, Texas, and will be a week long affair from the 17-20 of April. In order to fund our way to Worlds we have set up a GoFundMe page where anyone can sponsor us. Here is the link: https://www.gofundme.com/acme-robotics-season-funding

Also, please click here if you would like to know how we did at Worlds last year and learn a little bit about it. 

As always, 

GO ACME!

Qualifier, Rover Ruckus

Napa Tournament

This past weekend ACME attended the Napa Qualifier. This was our last qualifying tournament, and since we had already qualified for the Northern California Regionals, this tournament was a practice tournament and we didn’t feel the need to be completely stressed out about matches. 

We practiced judging bright and early and set up our pit area. This tournament we wanted to test out a new pre-scouting technique where we went around to our alliance partners for each match and asked them to draw out their autonomous paths on a field diagram we had printed out. This worked quite well, as it allowed us to run different auto paths based on our partners capabilities and paths. 

Our qualifying matches went very well! We won every one and placed third overall. Since we didn’t need to qualify, we weren’t interested in being alliance captain, so we decided to let the first place team pick us for their alliance. Although we went out in the semi-finals, we had a great time competing. 

Another big accomplishment for this tournament was that every single group of judges came and talked to us. This meant that we made the shortlist for every award where judges come and talk to you. This was a first and we were very proud that our judging presentation made such a good impression on the judges. 

We ended the day by winning the Control award for our software. It was 

Uncategorized

Season Overview

ACME’s 2017-18 season has been quite an eventful one. In fact, it has been the most successful season in ACME history. Successful not from just a competition standpoint, but from the work the team decided to do at the beginning of the season, and how we accomplished all of it.

At the beginning of the year, the team leads sat down and discussed the goals for this year. There were Hardware team goals and Software teams goals, yes. But they also decided that they wanted to attend Worlds in the Spring. The road to worlds was not an easy one. There were countless sleepless nights and way too much Panda Express, but we somehow persevered.

Qualifiers

Each FTC team is allowed to attend three qualifiers for a chance to win a spot at their state’s championship. Our first qualifier was in Folsom. We did relatively well there, even making it to the finals. We even won first place Think, and second place Inspire at the tournament.

Our second qualifier was in Santa Clara. This is where things were looking really downhill for us. The robot hadn’t been working all day, we were spinning circles around the field. In other words, it was a terrible day in the world of robots. Somehow, we managed to not be put down by our experiences and we managed to stay sort of positive throughout the day. The judges recognized how hard we were trying and kept coming back to our pit to check on us. Although we didn’t think we would get an award, a few team members stayed back anyways. We won first Inspire at Santa Clara. That award scored us a spot at the Northern California Championships.

Even though we had already won an spot at NorCals, we attended our third qualifier anyways. It was good practice for when we would actually be at NorCals. Stark contrast to our last tournament, this qualifier was actually quite good and we had a lot of excellent matches. We made it to the finals as the first seed. For our alliance partner we picked Tech Support, who we ended up winning the qualifier with. To this day, we are still very good friends with their team.

Northern California Regionals

The Northern California Regionals was a really important tournament to excel at because our performance determined the rest of the season. This event lasted two days and was held in Newark, California (Bay Area). Only the best of Northern California attend this event and we were hard pressed to qualify for Supers.

We did really well at NorCals. We were able to be on our division’s first seed alliance and win not only our division, but also come first in both divisions. After that victory, we certainly didn’t expect to receive any awards, but we ended up going home with first place Inspire. This was a huge honor, especially considering how small of a town we are from. Both of our wins qualified us for the Western Super Regionals.

Western Super Regionals

The Western Super Regionals were held in Spokane, Washington, this year. We were really looking forward to the higher level of competition that Supers promised. We spent the weeks after NorCals hurrying to get the robot ready. Unfortunately, our performance at Supers wasn’t as good as we hoped it would be. We were having problems with connectivity (our robot phones were not communicating well), so that meant our robot’s movements were lagging. This issue is out of our control, but it was still frustrating to watch our robot spin from time to time.

Although our performance was not spectacular at that particular time, we managed to earn a spot on the first seed alliance. Although we did not win, the good news was that our robot was working much better as less teams were on the fields. Since we had not qualified through performance, all that was left were award. We were given three awards: first Connect, second Think, and third Inspire. All three of these awards guaranteed us a spot at Worlds.

Houston World Championship

We had finally completed all of our goals! After tireless work we were finally going to Worlds. This was a major moment for our senior members as this was their last chance to go to Worlds. Everyone was very happy that we all had the chance to go.

Houston was unlike any qualifier our championship we had ever been to. It spanned four days, with matches, judging and finals spread across them. All of the FIRST levels were also there, FLL Jr., FLL, FTC, and FRC. Overall, World is a much grander event than any other FIRST championship.

We gained a lot of good experience at Worlds. We preformed well and learned a lot about the game (which is funny, because we had been trying to complete the challenge for the eight previous months). Anyways, even though we didn’t win any awards or make it to the finals we were glad to have had the chance to compete with team all over the World who love FTC just as much as we do.

Overall

Overall, this year has been a year to remember. We competed in all of the tournaments you could qualify for, won Inspire on several occasions (even getting a nice orange Inspire banner!!), and gained more experience and knowledge to be used next year.

We are hoping to get back to Worlds next season and maybe even win an award or make it to the finals. For now, we have a lot of planning to do over the summer to prep us for the next FIRST Tech Challenge.

Championship, Relic Recovery

ACME Robotics at the Houston World Championship

This past week the team attended our final competition of the season, Worlds. Now, like any sporting event,  the nationals or the worlds competition is for the best of the best in the sport, robotics is no different. Teams from China to Lebanon were in attendance of this week-long robotics event.

The Event

As I mentioned before, the championship was for teams all over the world. The championship also spanned almost the whole week and was for all levels of FIRST. The event took place in the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. FLL Jr., FLL, FTC, FRC, the Innovation Fair, Scholarship Row, and various other FIRST attractions were spread out all over the center.

The FTC championship was separated into two divisions, Franklin and Jemison. FIRST likes to name their divisions after famous people in science or history. Franklin was named after Benjamin Franklin and Jemison after the first African American woman to travel into space, Mae Jemison. Each division had their own matches until they had their division winner. Then the two divisions had a final match at Minute Maid Stadium, across the street from the convention center.

The pits were also a very fun place to be. Teams were each given space for a 10×10 pit. Our pit was made out of the same 8020 from Supers. We didn’t have any major changes to our pit besides keeping it a little more organized.

The Matches

After supers we decided not to make any major changes to the robot in an effort to allow the Software team to practice our autonomous routine. In fact the only changes we made to the robot were new intake blocks and an new design on the intake bar.

Each team competes in nine matches total. These matches were spread across two days. We had several good matches, but we were affected by connectivity issues. We had several great alliance partners and played some interesting matches. By the end of the matches we won 6 out of 9 of our matches.

Next was alliance selection. We did not get picked by the top seeded alliance, but it was good experience talking to the different teams.

Overall Experience

Our first overall experience at Worlds was a very good. We now know what we need to improve on for next year and we are already setting our goals. Now that we have had a taste of the higher competition levels in FIRST, we are looking forward to competing for a spot at Worlds next year.

Championship

Super Regionals 2018

The Western Super Regionals is a competition only for the best teams in states west of the Mississippi. Made up of 72 highly elite teams, the three days of competition are jam packed with matches, judging, pit time, fun and robots. The team spent weeks preparing for this major event. This year was the second year ACME had made it to Supers and we were trying everything in our power to reach our goal and make it to the Worlds Competition.

Supers was held this year in Spokane, Washington, at the Spokane Convention Center. This competition was much like the ones before, except bigger and longer. Normally teams are given a plastic table for a pit area, at Supers, the pit are ten by ten by ten. Meaning we had enough space for a pop up.

The match schedule also spanned across two days (Friday and Saturday). We had nine matches in total. We did pretty well during the matches, however we did have some slight problems with our REV hub, but the pit crew managed to fix it before our final match.

After the matches it was all about trying to be on an alliance for the finals. Two sister team, Revamped and Overcharged, seemed very interested in our three glyph autonomous routine on the back cryptobox, so we thought we had a pretty good chance.

As it turns out, we did. The sister teams picked us to be their final alliance partner and the finals matches began. Unfortunately, we were beaten by our opponents in the final match between our division, but we did our best.

Awards were a major focus in our strategy to qualify to Worlds. At Supers, if you get third, second, or first in any award it automatically qualifies you for Worlds. We won first place in the Connect Award, second place Think, and third place Inspire. Also, we were one of a few teams at Supers to qualify three times for Worlds!

ACME is very excited to be heading to the Worlds Competition in Houston, Texas. We couldn’t have done it without our amazing mentors guiding us all through the season. Thanks so much you guys!

If you would like to contribute to our team, please click the I want to help! button at the top of this page. Stay tuned for more information on our process for getting to Worlds!

Go ACME!

Relic Recovery

Our Very Own Dean’s List Finalist

Dean’s List is a big honor

The FIRST FTC Dean’s List is a prestigious honor given to students who, as sourced from FTC’s website, are “great examples of student leaders who have led their Teams and communities to increased awareness for FIRST and its mission. These students have also achieved personal technical expertise and accomplishment. It is the intention of FIRST that these individuals will continue on, post-Award, as great leaders, student alumni, and advocates of FIRST.” * 

Teams are allowed to nominate two 10th or 11th graders from their team to be Dean’s List Semi-Finalists.  FIRST Representatives have the task of deciding which students fit the criteria for a Dean’s List Finalist. The winners are announced at the various state regionals around the country. 

Dean’s List Criteria

Criteria for selection of the FIRST Dean’s List include, but are not limited to a student’s:• Demonstrated leadership and commitment to the ideals of FIRST;• Interest in and passion for a long term commitment to FIRST and its ideals;• Overall individual contribution to their team;• Technical expertise and passion;• Entrepreneurship and creativity;• Ability to motivate and lead fellow team members; and• Ability to effectively increase awareness of FIRST in their school and community.

Our Dean’s List Nominee 

ACME nominated our very own Kelly Muir, a long time member of ACME.  Our mentors submitted an application to FIRST at the end of 2017, which included an essay about why he is a qualified candidate.  Later,  he had an interview with FIRST representatives.  Kelly thought the interview went well, but still wasn’t feeling too confident that he would get it. He had to wait to find out how he did until we attended the Northern California Regionals.  

Before awards were given out at Regionals, the Dean’s List Finalists for Northern California were announced.  Kelly Muir was the first name called to the stage. There are about 200 teams in Northern California, which each can nominate two students, so being one of only 4 people picked to represent Northern California as a top FIRST student is a huge, huge honor. Now Kelly is in the running to be named one of the 10 final Dean’s List students, who are announced at the FTC World Championship in April.

Championship

Northern California Regionals

Last weekend, ACME Robotics attended the Northern California Regionals at Newark Memorial High School in Newark, California.  This two-day event was much like the other qualifiers before – except bigger.  56 teams participated and only ten were allowed to advance to the Western Super Regionals.  There were two divisions, Silicon and Gold.   About 28 teams were in each division.  The good thing about divisions is you only have to play teams in your division – until the finals.

This event – as mentioned before – spanned two days.  Saturday evening we checked in, had field inspection and our judges interview. In the week leading up to this event, we spent numerous hours practicing our judges interview.  All our hard reciting payed off, and the interview was one of the best we have ever had.

On Sunday we set up our pit.  Then, went around our division (Silicon) to do Pre-Match Scouting.  After opening ceremonies the matches began.  Our first few matches were not that great.  We were having connectivity issues once again (see the Santa Clara Qualifier), and our robot was quite spastic.  We won a few matches, then lost a few.  It wasn’t our best performance but it wasn’t our worst either.  We finished out the matches in 20th place.

Now, that is not amazing placement in the slightest.  But, we knew we could do better and sought a chance to prove it.  Team 4216, the Rise of Hephaestus, was the top scoring team in our division.  Therefore, they were our best chance at being on the winning alliance.  They had already decided to choose team 5214, Tech Support as their first alliance pick. We had to convince Rise to choose us for their second pick.  We did this by talking to Tech Support.  Our case was that since most teams would off the field and their robot phones turned off, we would be able to preform much better because there would be a stronger signal.

As it turns out, this worked.  Rise of Hephaestus picked us to be their second alliance partners.  Eager to prove they had made the right choice, we gave it our all.  For the first round Rise and Tech Support were up against the fourth place alliance.  They were able to win that match and after the Gold division played their first round, we moved straight into our second round.  During this round, Rise and ourselves were up against two teams who played a very defensive game.  The plan: to fill our Cryptobox as fast as possible then protect Rise’s bot as they  finished their box and tried to score relics.  Our protective strategy worked and we were able to hold off the other team while Rise finished scoring Relics.  The downside was that our relic recover-er was hanging off the robot.  The 3D printed part had snapped off.  Luckily, we had printed an extra part and were able to get it on and working before we started our final match.

Our final match was quite eventful.  It was us and Rise for an alliance. We actually almost soft-capped (meaning we scored all of the points possible between our alliance), but we didn’t score our Glyph during the autonomous period.  During that match both of our teams were able to: knock off the jewel, park in the safe zone, compete a full Cryptobox in a Cipher pattern, score a Relic in the third zone upright, and balance on the Balancing Stone.  If you would like to watch our final match, please click on the link:  ACME and Rise of Hephaestus Final Match .

We had qualified for Super Regionals when we were on the Winning Alliance, but the awards ceremonies had just begun.   We were nominated for several awards, including the Control Award, the Innovate Award and the Think Award.  The real surprise, however, came when the Inspire Award winner was announced.  The Inspire Award is the highest award you can win at any FIRST event.  At the Northern California Regionals, ACME Robotics was announced as the winners of the Inspire Award!

This was the first time in ACME history that we have won the Inspire Award at a major tournament such as NorCals.  We were so excited.  After a long day of ups and downs, this was just the thing we needed to complete our tournament experience.

The next step in the season is to participate in Spokane, Washington, at the Western Super Regionals.  We will be starting a GoFundMe campaign soon in order to raise funds for our trip. Keep checking our website for updates on the coming competition.

As always:

GO ACME!