Posted in Power play Season

Wrapping Up the Season

We just had our end of the year party, wrapping up the Power Play season. During the party, we reflected on the areas in the team that need improving. We have decided to commit more hours to help inspire kids and adults in our community about FIRST. We’re going to host a summer workshop and go to our sponsors to talk to them about our team and FIRST!!! We all signed nine cones and gave one to each team member this year. The cones will be something to remind us of the great season we had this year and all the ways we’ve been blessed. We look forward to taking time off from the competition and working on our outreach!!! Thanks to our coaches and all of our sponsors this year!!!

Picture of the team signing cones.
Posted in Power play Season

We Accomplished What We Came For and More!

We just had our second ftc east regional competition at San Jacinto College last Saturday, the 25th. We’ve been very busy lately, preparing for it since league finals was just a week ago. We had a great time at regions and are all very proud of ourselves. This season ended up as being the best season we’ve had yet, doing much better than we expected (we excepted to be ranked in the top half of teams). Our team ended up in 8th place (out of 35 teams) after all the 44 qualification matches had been played! We were then selected, by the 3rd place alliance in the semifinals! Sadly though, we lost 2-0, and learned again what gracious professionalism really means. Our autonomous, that stacked one cone on the high and parked in the correct spot (with the signal sleeve), didn’t go haywire like previous occasions and almost stacked the cone three times on the high junction and parked in the correct spot (thanks to our king coder). Our high score out of all the matches was 177! Our team would like to give a big thanks to all our mentors and sponsors, for all the support they’ve given us this year. We wouldn’t be the team we are without them. And another big thanks to San Jacinto College, for hosting the ftc east regional tournament again. I think our team can not only say we accomplished what we came for, but also made more progress than our teams ever made before!

Posted in Power play Season

First League Meet

After a long wait, the Sensational Seven is ready to take on the west Houston league. But first, tragedy struck on Thursday, our scissor lift broke. Scrambling for a solution, we decided to opt with our backup 4-bar lift design that we had in Autodesk Fusion 360 ready to be built by the next competition. Instead of waiting, we went ahead and built the 4-bar lift in a time span of 8 hours the day before the competition. When we arrived, there was doubt that any team would be able to complete a circuit at the first meet. We not only completed a circuit in our third match, but we were the only team to complete a circuit the entire competition. Our revamped arm-lift design worked excellently. overall we had an amazing time, and it was a great on-ramp to the competition season. Big thank you to Hogg Middle School for hosting the competition.

Posted in Power play Season

Football meets robotics in an epic up-cycling adventure!

Inspired by grippy gloves as seen in the World Cup and our coach’s supply of football gear, we cut up football gloves to help our claw grip the cones.
Designing different ideas in the very real case that one of our parts might not work.
Because the scissor lift is slow and wobbly, we are designing an alternative double 4 bar lift solution in Autodesk Fusion.
Finishing the wiring for the scissor lift so our programmer can get started.
Hard at work programming controllers and updating FTC SDK and Roadrunner
Posted in Power play Season

Finished the Robot…Kinda

We finally have something resembling a robot!

Our scissor lift enables us to reach the highest pole, but our manipulator claw needs more work.

Our coding king working on our Java program

Our CAD king working a gripper design to 3-D print.

Writing thank you notes for our generous sponsors. Check out our Sponsor page to find out who they are!
Posted in Power play Season

2022-2023 Game Release Day!

Our new team of nine met to watch the new game video for Power Play, and we immediately started brainstorming ideas. Our build team already designed a couple of ideas in Fusion 360.

Our programming team started making a priorities list and planning the programming flow chart that will be the bones of our autonomous program.

We are excited about this challenge and can’t wait to see what we can accomplish!