The greatest program in the world

For those of you who do not know what FIRST robotics is, you are missing out! The FIRST program has been a huge amount of fun and has yeilded a high amount of learning. Its six intense weeks of laboring and hard work into the wee hours of the morning may turn some away. Spending over 12 hours at school, sometimes up to 18. Getting (usually) homemade food, usually pasta, and looking forward to dessert. Grabbing handfuls of snacks to bring to your work area. Yeah, it can get pretty rough, but all in all it is a lot of fun.

Our team, Team R.I.C.E. 870 has been alive and has dominating for seven seasons, with its greatest season being this year. Robotics started for me in eigth grade when our school started their FIRST Lego team. As programmer on the team I used the standard software to drag and drop blocks on the screen to create awesome little programs. We had an awesome system programmed by the time competiton came. We found the most innovative way to complete several of the challenges.

In ninth grade I joined the FRC team and tried to learn what I could. Very little was taught to me, but I took in what I could. I also helped out with the programming by doing simple tasks such as reseting the robot and moving it if needed. At the SBPLI Long Island Regional we took home 1st place.

My tenth grade year was a little rough. I spent most of my time alone in the tech room next door working on an animation for the FIRST visualization award. Several times dinner would be served and I would be forgotten. I would stumble out of my "cave" weary and looking for food to find out that it had already been put away. My animation ended up running a day past the due date, this was due to power outages, but thanks to FIRST I was still allowed to submit my animation. I ended up bringing home the only award that year for the team with the FIRST visualization award at SBPLI.

This year I was back in business and thrown to the programming world. Before the start of the season I worked to have our programming room squared away, with three work stations. With little knowledge of the control system and the default code I started my learning. I quickly became aquented with the control system and picked apart the code. I quickly got various sensors working well with our controller and in a few short weeks I had accomplished more in programming then anyone on our team previously. I was very excited when the ultrasonic sensors we had ordered came in, which I wrote my own firmware for. With the ultrasonic sensor I was able to make the arms of our bot automatically close when the ball came in the correct place. This was one of the most usefull features of the bot. All of the code I wrote I made very very easy to read and follow with plenty of comment. This was so students in future years would be able to have a head start if they need. The bot we made this year was the best our team had built. We were in first place in all of the qualifying rounds and only lost in the semi-finals due to techinal difficults which left our robot paralyzed. We found the error to be in a faulty speed controller, something in which nothing could have been done to know or prevent it.

Work from previous years