We were extremely successful on the Saturday of GSR! We realized our robots strengths and strategized accordingly with alliance partners. We made every attempt to perform coopertition balances with our opposition. We won two of the matches and tied another. By the end of qualification matches we were seeded 11th. We created a pick list from the data our hard working scouts recorded for us.

Many teams picked within the top 8 teams and we quickly moved up to 7th seed. We couldn't have made better picks from the robots that were still available. We chose team 885 for their reliable teleop and autonomous scoring. We chose team 2791 because we knew (from our scouting) that they were one of the best balancers at the tournament! Because we ranked teams based on many factors, we knew who was the best teleop scorer, autonomous scorer, and balancer. This helped us find robots that may have been overlooked by other teams who could complement our abilities!

After alliance selection we quickly started strategizing with our alliance partners. We tried a three robot balance with our alliance partners on the practice field before the quarter finals, but between the differing weights of the robots and the fact that our two alliance partners were four wheel drive, we could not find a way of doing it without one of our partners either toppling off the top end of the bridge or getting flipped by the bottom end of the bridge as it tipped up. We tried all the different combinations of robot order, and several combinations of having the robots facing forwards or backwards, but none of them worked. If one of our partners had been a six wheel drive robot, we think we could have done it, but that was not to be. We decided that we would balance at the end of the match with team 2791 for the 20 point bonus.

Once again we had a great alliance and strategy that built on the strengths of all three robots. We came extremely close to winning GSR three years in a row! Unfortunately team 2791's robot blew all of the motor controllers for their drive motors during the second finals match, which was why they were stationary for much of the match. This could not be repaired in time for the third final match, and we were unfortunately too late in realizing that we were going to need a backup robot. It was exciting to see how many teams were rooting for us during the finals. More than one team asked if we needed any batteries, and others said that if we needed any help they would be glad to do whatever was needed.

It was a lot of fun to see a large quantity of tie-die blue waving and cheering during all of our matches. We were very fortunate to have made it as far as we did and our alliance ended up placing second for the regional! Our team also won the Team Spirit award, and team member, Amelia Jennings, was selected as a Dean's List Finalist. It was another successful GSR for team 1519. Our team will be spending the next three weeks making appropriate changes to our robot to prepare for a second regional on April 5th-7th in Raleigh, NC. We are very excited to compete again!

This year our robot has a 2-speed, 8-wheel drive base, and is equipped with a harvester, a shooter, and a reliable balancing capability.

We recently competed at the Granite State Regional. Here is some news from the Friday of that competition!

During Friday of the Granite State Regional we played six matches, and had one of our busiest days ever in the pit. We burned up two or three harvester motors, and played a couple of matches without the ability to pick up balls (or to fire more than one in autonomous). Towards the end of the day we decided to give up on fitting the azimuth to the shooter. To do this we had to raise the shooter by a half inch. This meant that the feed roller, which moves balls off the top of the harvester and into the shooter wheels no longer had good contact with the ball sitting at the top of the harvester. This meant we only fired a single ball in autonomous sometimes. It also meant that the only way to shoot a ball was to have another one underneath it in the harvester to push it up into the feed roller.

There was one match where we did nothing all match, because our robot was disabled because of a field issue. The issue was fixed after the match and providentially our alliance still won the match. It was extremely frustrating to have our robot disabled for a match through no fault of our own, but at least we still won.

Another thing we found was that we are shooting the balls at GSR further than any of the balls we have at the practice field, even the new ones. It took us a while to dial the shooter calibration down to allow the camera targeting to work. We did manage to score some balls in autonomous and at least one in teleop.

During qualification matches, we had scouts in the stands all day watching other robots and entering each robot's strengths, weaknesses, and general abilities into a computer based scouting system. Instead of ranking teams based on wins and losses, our scouting system ranks robots by their ability to score and earn points for their alliance. Our scouts communicated our findings to our robot drive team to help them develop match strategies. This helped the drive team know who to approach from the opposite alliance in order to perform a coopertition balance.

We had good success balancing the bridge, and were directly approached by a couple of teams who wanted us to be their partner for the coopertition bridge, which was flattering. We are one of the few teams to have done two middle bridge balances. Unfortunately we had two occasions where our coopertition partner was a no show. On one occasion, we were quick enough to go to our own bridge and balance that on our own anyway. We also had some success playing defense, and several teams congratulated us on the way we played hard defense without conceding any fouls.

Build season 2012 is almost over! We're planning to compete in the Week Zero tournament this Saturday (2/18) at Nashua High School South. Also we will be competing in two regionals this year, the BAE Granite State Regional at the Verizon Wireless Arena (March 1st-3rd), and the North Carolina Regional at the Dorton Arena (April 5th-7th)!

Last fall several students attended PTC's Design and CAD training workshops to learn how to use their CREO CAD and MathCAD software.

We competed at River Rage at Manchester Memorial High School. The first pick at this off season tournament was random, we ended up drawing team 78! We then chose our friends from Hollis, team 1073 for our third robot. We had a blast at this off season tournament and ended up winning!

Our team traveled to Indiana to compete in the Indiana Robotics Invitational on July 22nd and 23rd. We were seeded 10th after qualification matches and were picked to join the 6th seeded alliance of teams 11, 1538, and 2337, as their back-up bot. We were able to help out our alliance in a couple elimination matches but were knocked out in semi-finals.

Yesterday, we participated in the "Mayhem in Merrimack" tournament held by Merrimack High School, FRC Team #166.We fielded two robots (1519 and 9151) at Mayhem in Merrimack using "rookie" drive teams of Jackson/Kaileb/NathanG for 1519, and DavidJ/Amelia/AJ for 9151. We were seeded #4 (1519) and #5 (9151) after 8 qualifying matches. 1519 chose 138 as their alliance partners; 9151 chose 238. In the double elimination tournament, we had the misfortune of playing each other in the 1st round (1519 beat 9151) and then again in the loser's bracket (9151 beat 1519). 9151 then continued on to the "loser's bracket finals" where they lost to the finalist alliance (40 and 166). The tournament winners were the #1 seed alliance of 190 and 1073.

We competed at BattleCry on May 20th and 21st. We won BattleCry with teams 1073 and 238!
1073 was the #4 seeded alliance captain and chose us as their pick; 238 was assigned to the alliance in the random assignments. We enjoyed the Friday night social as well, which included icecream, karaoke, DDR, CRUD, games, and much more!

We were invited to demonstrate our robot for the attendee's at the NHHTC End-of-Year Awards Banquet. Also in attendance were teams 151 from Nashua, and 166 from Merrimack.

We brought our robot to show the students at Wilton Head Start. We also brought other activities for them to learn about different aspects of engineering a robot.

We held a demonstration of our robot at the Milford Rotary Club's annual Seniors BBQ.