Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

We are going to REGIONALS!

WOW WOW WOW! We had an amazing time at our League Championship! After the qualifying rounds, we were ranked second which put us in the coveted position of choosing an alliance partner for the final elimination rounds. We chose an all girl team named the Brainiac Maniacs as our alliance partner, and we are glad we did! We made it to the final matches, but lost 2 to 1.

Sensational 7 Robotics was called many times during the awards ceremony! Here is a list of our awards…

1st place Control Award
2nd place Finalist Alliance Award

3rd place Inspire Award

1st place Control Award

2nd place Design Award

3rd place Think Award

2nd place Finalist Award

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

2022 Southeast Texas Regionals

Sensational 7 Robotics had a great time at regionals. We met some awesome teams, learned a lot, and placed 11th in our region! Our competition season is over, but we are excited to meet with some of our sponsors this spring and work on a new outreach project. Stay tuned for more details…

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Sponsor Highlight–The Roof Man LLC

If you are looking for an honest, hardworking, and dependable roofing company, look no further! The Roof Man LLC is the company for you. One of our members recently had the roof replaced on their home, and the owner, Timothy Todd, makes you feel like the most important customer he has. The time and dedication he puts into ensuring a quality roofing job is refreshing and hard to find in a roofing company.

Call The Roof Man for a free estimate! You won’t have to call anyone else.

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Sponsor Highlight–Fulshear Animal Hospital

Fulshear Animal Hospital opened in 2006 and has been providing quality care for Katy/Fulshear area pets for 15 years. Dr. Marne Baird is a graduate of Texas A&M University and a compassionate and skilled veterinarian.

Many Sensational 7 Robotics members entrust the care of our pets to Dr. Baird and the staff at Fulshear Animal Hospital. Visit their website to find out more about their services and give them a call! Your furry family members will thank you!

29810 FM 1093 Road,  Suite G

Fulshear, Texas 77441

281-346-0077

Fax 281-533-0203

http://fulshearanimalhospital.com

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Designing. Creating. Taking Chances

Way back in 2018 before the world got really crazy and COVID took over, Sensational 7 Robotics was born. The original team was comprised of seven homeschoolers and a husband/wife team as our coaches. The S7 logo is our favorite part of the team’s shirts, but there is a motto written on the back that encompasses what we do:

Designing. Creating. Taking Chances.

We have learned so much these last few years about the engineering process, public speaking, networking, and team work. Our coaches stretch us every year by giving us new challenges and goals to work towards. This season we are focusing on the “Designing” part of our motto.

Using tutorial videos on YouTube created by FTC team Primitive Data, we have all almost mastered taking ideas from our mind and designing them in Fusion 360 (a CAD software). Here are some of our designs for this year’s robot.

After our members design their ideas in Fusion 360 at home, we come to our meeting prepared to build the prototypes. Here is what we have built so far…

There is a lot more hard work left to do! Thank you to FTC Primitive Data for making and posting tutorials for Fusion 360. Please check them out if your team needs help navigating this software!

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Field Elements Have Arrived!

The best day of any new season is when the field elements arrive! We spent all afternoon setting up the field in our garage. We are most excited about the carousel element of Freight Frenzy. So many ideas are bouncing around in our heads for how we are go make sure we accomplish the carousel part of the challenge. A rubber duck will be sitting on the carousel (picture on the right), and our robot will have to spin the carousel to deposit the rubber duck onto the field…during the autonomous period. Our programmers really have their work cut out for them! The carousel will be an important way to score points later in the driving portion as well so it is essential that we think of and design an effective and efficient solution!

If you are interested in watching the video of this year’s challenge click on the link below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6lX12idAf8&t=50s

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Sponsor Highlight—Sommet Strategies

Every month we’d like to highlight one of our sponsors. This month we highlight Sommet Strategies!

http://www.sommetstrategies.com

Do you own or work for a business that is poised for growth?

Do you need help building a financial and operations infrastructure?

Sommet Strategies will work with you as an outsourced CFO team to make sure your business is ready to grow and thrive!

We are so thankful the people at Sommet Strategies recognize the importance of a STEM education through FIRST by supporting Sensational 7 Robotics!

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Raised Chassis Challenge

This week our challenge was to design the best way to raise our existing chassis by 20% in order to drive over obstacles. We broke into two teams, sketched our design on paper and presented it to our coaches. We then took ideas from both teams to design a whole new, raised chassis.

Our design team took to Autodesk Fusion 360, our CAD program, and started sketching our new design.

The programming broke off and practiced Java programming. We are learning a lot this summer!

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Robotics Challenge #1

This summer our coaches are presenting us with mini-challenges to stretch our brains and get us to “think on paper”. Hopefully this will help us create an awesome engineering notebook for the Freight Frenzy season.

Our challenge: Create a structure that will hold a wiffle ball and write and/or draw instructions for someone who is building it in another location.

Group 1
Group 2

The hardest part of this challenge was writing instructions detailed enough for someone to follow. We learned how important it is to be detailed, neat, organized, and thorough when writing instructions. We found we had an easier time telling and showing how to do something, but explaining in writing was quite difficult. We hope to improve this skill this summer because clear written explanations are an important part of our engineering notebook.

Posted in Freight Frenzy Season

Back at it again…finally!

After our very successful workshops last summer, the Covid-19 numbers skyrocketed across the country. We decided to put robotics meetings on hold and focus on learning Fusion 360 and Java programming independently.

One year later, we are ready to get the team back together again. A few of our team members have moved on to other adventures, but we have added a new member who we are excited to work with!

The build team spent our first meeting re-familiarizing themselves with the Tetrix parts by building a push bot.

Build Team

The programming team worked on completing simple programming challenges by writing code in block coding. They were able to program the robot to navigate an obstacles using distance sensors.

Programming Team