Battlebots IQ 2006! *picture intensive*

[Checkmate]

I'll have to start with an apology. Not sure what mood I was in when I read it yesterday. There was also some misinformation and I should have come about it a different way. Either way I'm glad you replied in a much better manner than I.

I should have asked about the IFI and how you used it. If you shock mounted it and did all that stuff you certainly knew what you were doing and probably had a defective motherboard. Last year we had that issue where we would hit and basically I'd have to sit on the robot reset button. About Tom though.. it's just that IQ and USFIRST nationals were on the same week. That's all. I love Tom and think hes a great guy. I was actually really upset to find out that he couldn't make it to the event. As far as IFI goes though. Bill is a trained IFI person and we had all the event software, hardware, and stuff. The only difference is that Tom has more experience. A lot of the times there were issues and no one even told Bill. I guess they either didn't know he was in charge of the IFI stuff or couldn't find him.

There should be more videos online I'll try to find them for you. From last year and this year. I really didn't get to see many matches this year. Between my own robot and helping so many others the whole week is this huge blur of excitement.

now that i think about it, i think excellerator 3 took their second loss against marvinator due to either IFI issues, or an electrical connection coming loose.

You're right - wire loss or IFI issue.. Even then to take that many hits from Excellerator and out last them is quite impressive. Luckilly for MnG they had an IFI all throughout the event and experienced no problems that I can see with it.

I think you missed that my "hey, if you have 13 girls teams from one school one has to do well" comment was a joke.

Yea. In retrospect. I should have replied differently. I know what you mean about the amount of work put into a robot. It's tough sometimes. w/ respect to their bot a lot of things come into play especially money though. It'd be nice to afford 4 minimags, 4 astros, a 10,000 dollar shell. etc. Perhaps not as effective but it still worked out. The girls on pretty in pink now are totally different girls from before. They are a group of freshmen who inherited the robot almost two weeks before competition and rebuilt it/got it working. It was nice to see it run at all and I think in those two weeks the girls learned a lot things. Next year they can take that information and build a better robot. They seemed interested which is good.

really? i was in the stands for that match and it looked to me like revenant didnt move, and spiderbot hit them. id like to see the video if you have it.

Yea.. I wish I had a video of it. I recently formatted. I know the people from Icewave, Greenwave, and Revenant personally so they might have some of it online or on their computers. In the match you could see revenant spin up and go to the other square where spiderblade was spinning in place (not sure why). The driver miss-aligned and hit the wall full force. It was very painful to watch.

hmm, i just heard that paul used the spektrum the whole competition, but i didnt hear that directly from him. I didnt know that he was having radio issues, i thought that he just didnt want to stress his bot too much. the blade already had quite a bit of damage on it, and last year the gearbox broke on him against falcon. i thought he was preserving it and just using his bot strategically as a wedge.

Nah. It was reception issues. I think he rebuilt the gearbox last year because he went to R3 and won that competition. Then he remachined the bot over. It's still greenwave but new parts (for the most part). The blade is pretty beat up on some edges but far from un-useable. If you watched his matches though from like his 3rd match on he was using the blade a lot more. The Spektrum solved his RF problems. He probably had a damaged futaba receiver.

hmm, it looked like the blade bent, but i never saw it afterwards. i guess the bot just was knocked off balance. it is a great bot, and deserved first place last year. that reminds me though, what happened to alakran? i loved that bot, and was disappointed that they didnt come back this year.

He kinda drove into that bad spot on the floor. His wedge popped up. His starter chain jammed the blade and well that force from the blade stopping created a nice moment/torque and flipped him right over. I'm not sure what happened to Alakran but one of their robots this year looked very similar to it.

i just brought it up because i found it funny that they spent their time setting up this arrogant plan of what they would do when they won, and they never won a match.

I dont think it was much of an arrogant plan. If you met some of these girls they were quite nice. They probably just wanted to give something to teams they beat. I'm not so sure they ment it in a demeaning way though.

also, i talked to a few of the girls on dark angel and they didnt seem to like pretty in pink, they said the team didnt put much work in and came essentially just to skip school.

I dunno. I saw two of them work every day for two weeks straight on either that or their 15lb. For the rest of the team I can't speak though because the only faces/names I remember are the two that I helped. I'm sure that on a lot of the other days their team was there.

i know, and its not hard to believe. youre acting like im sexist (although admittedly, i guess my posts could have been interpreted that way, which is why i have to try to explain myself). I know girls can be good engineers and im glad when that is proven... although, a lot of the girls there were there just for the trip.

Yea. I apologize again. I should have written a much nicer *FIRST* reply rather than doing what I did. It's the same with guys. It happens on every team. I've felt the frustration of being on a huge FIRST team and then seeing some people just come along for the free trip. It's a problem that happens with every team/school. There isn't a real solution for it because you can argue that somehow those people are getting as much as THEY want out of the experience where as you are getting much more out of it because you want to. In the end it's all exposure to engineering that matters.

[SubliminalMessage]Play Paintball![/SubliminalMessage]

how did you find this thread, anyway? just a random search online?

Heh. I'm actually going to play on saturday =)

And as far as finding this.. someone sent me the link and I'm not sure how they found it themselves.

[WenULiVeUdiE]

Looks like an awesome program slade! The more I read about it, the more I would like to try it out.

I am very happy to see women in the program as well. It is important they are exposed to engineering as well. I don't mean to brag, but my team has doubled the amount of female members from last year and we have held assemblies for female students about female engineers.

I don't have pictures from Nationals to share with you. But we didn't have anything as cool as that. Our robot was too damn reliable. Nothing broke furing the entire 3-day period, so I had nothing to fix. I ended up sanding and polishing my cell phone as well fusing a vice with out work table with another team member.

[slade]

Eh. I'll have to start with an apology. Not sure what mood I was in when I read it yesterday. There was also some misinformation and I should have come about it a different way. Either way I'm glad you replied in a much better manner than I.

hmm? maybe im too used to the internet, but your reply seemed fine. i should probably apologize, since although i loved the competition, i wasnt too happy with a few things afterwards.

I should have asked about the IFI (or iffy) and how you used it. If you shock mounted it and did all that stuff you certainly knew what you were doing and probably had a defective motherboard. Last year we had that issue where we would hit and basically I'd have to sit on the robot reset button. About Tom though.. it's just that IQ and USFIRST nationals were on the same week. That's all. I love Tom and think hes a great guy. I was actually really upset to find out that he couldn't make it to the event. As far as IFI goes though. Bill is a trained IFI person (for all extents and purposes) the only difference is that Tom has much more experience. A lot of the times there were issues no one even told Bill. I guess they either didn't know or couldn't find him.

maybe i should have explained the IFI issue better. when we started working on the robots we had two isaac 16s and one isaac 32 motherboard. one isaac 16 was not working and the team sent it back to IFI for it to get fixed, and it was returned after a little while. the plan was we would have two robots, which would each use an isaac 16 motherboard. the other robot was made as compact as possible (as you probably saw, that was "the brick") and it could barely fit the isaac 16 and servos inside. my robot had to be larger due to the arm and pneumatics, and the gearboxes. my friend origionally was going to do all the wiring for my bot, but i did the majority of it after he stopped coming. i finished the wiring and got to the point where the bot was driveable. at that point, the other robot was having a lot of issues. it would run fine while tethered, but when the radio was connected the wheels would run, then it would stop, then run, then stop. for a while they thought the issue was that the signal could not get through the 3/4" steel, so they first drilled a hole, and when that did not solve the problem, they cut a 3" hole out and covered it with lexan. it still didnt solve the problem. then they found out that even when the radio transmitter was right next to the isaac 16, the same thing would happen. so the other team took my isaac 16, and tested it in their bot... it worked fine. so they kept my isaac 16, and sent the other one back to IFI again... this was about a week before the ship date. i had to finish my robot, and then the night before the ship date i had to install the isaac 32 motherboard. to do so i used delrin mounts and lexan to hold the motherboard above the servos and gearbox, and had to redo the wiring. then of course because of the added weight of the new motherboard, transmitter and lexan, my bot was .5 pounds overweight, so i had to swiss cheese as much lexan as i could. then, when i finally was able to load the program and run it, the bot seemed to work fine... although it lost the radio signal at one point. not great. it was midnight of the ship date though, so i couldnt really do anything at that point but just pack up the bot.

when we got to the competition we had the isaac 16 back from IFI. i wanted to use it because the isaac 32 was larger and heavier, it had lost the signal too, and i was afraid of a hard hit knocking the mounts i made loose, since i didnt exactly have a lot of time to make them. so i switched everything out and reconnected all the wires. then my instructor said he wouldnt give us the program for the robot... he had "forgotten" his laptop at the hotel. the thing was, the program was the same program used last year which someone else who already graduated wrote. a freshman on the team, abraham, who had not done any work on either robot until the trip had said he could program the bot. when i wrote the documentation package my instructor told me to put him on the list as the "programmer", and i didnt even know who he was until he showed up when we left for the airport. aparently he had done some programming on FIRST vex. anyway, my instructor wanted him to be the one to program the bot since he was on the trip, instead of reusing the old program. so the morning of the inspection he downloaded the base program online, and we had to modify it to work on the bot. after that we had to go through the safety inspections and the bot worked fine (for all 10 seconds i tested it), although i wanted to test it out longer to make sure it wouldnt lose the signal again, which as you already know never happened. the first match was our test, and it didnt go too well. the bot lost the signal a few times, although we still won; same with the second match. after the second match we got someone there to help us, who i take it was bill. i told him what was happening and he told me to relocate the isaac and twist the motor wires, both of which i did. i also resecured some of the connections. the bot worked fine after that for the match against spinal tap, and, well, you know what happened when i went against black widow . i thought everything was working fine but not only was the isaac still having issues, only one motor was working. again i thought i fixed everything, but it was still having issues for the match with excellerator, which was just painful. im still not sure if the isaac was resetting or losing the radio signal; i know it was resetting when it took any shock, but at some points it appeared that it was losing the radio signal too, and would stop working even when it wasnt being jarred. also, it appeared that even firing the solenoid would mess up the motherboard.

given that, and the $3000 of damage to the bot i spent months working on, maybe you can understand why im not exactly happy with IFI.

There should be more videos online I'll try to find them for you. From last year and this year. I really didn't get to see many matches this year. Between my own robot and helping so many others the whole week is this huge blur of excitement.

thanks, id like to see some of the videos. there were some good matches, and i know i missed a few while working on my bot.

Yea. In retrospect. I should have replied differently. I know what you mean about the amount of work put into a robot. It's tough sometimes. w/ respect to their bot a lot of things come into play especially money though. It'd be nice to afford 4 minimags, 4 astros, a 10,000 dollar shell. etc. Perhaps not as effective but it still worked out. The girls on pretty in pink now are totally different girls from before. They are a group of freshmen who inherited the robot almost two weeks before competition and were told to build it. It was nice to see it run at all and I think in those two weeks the girls learned a lot things. Next year they can take that information and build a better robot. They seemed interested which is good.

heh, when i talked to the girls on dark angel they didnt really seem to like pretty in pink, they talked about them like they didnt do any work and were there just to miss school, and hadnt really put much work in. did the bot actually work? i wanted to see it, but never saw it actually run and was sort of disappointed. that is great though if they actually did put in effort, and want to come back to the competition (to compete) next year.

i know what you mean that money can be an issue. well, then again, maybe i dont, i really lucked out. my bot got the majority of the team funds since it did so well the previous year. then again, almost all of that went to the drive system. everything else the team bought was only a few hundred dollars, and the guys from raytheon got us a titanium sponsorship so the team didnt have to pay for that. the other bot reused all of its parts, the only new parts were the steel, bolts and a switch. maybe the wires too. only a few hundred dollars was put into it. it was origionally going to be called the "red-headed stepchild", but katie, the red-headed girl who worked on that bot, didnt really like the idea. then again, ross didnt really like my flowchart either... but he deserved that. ...hey, whoa, i never even posted my flowchart? here you go:

Nah. It was reception issues. I think he rebuilt the gearbox last year because he went to R3 and won that competition. Then he remachined the bot over. It's still greenwave but new parts (for the most part). The blade is pretty beat up on some edges but far from un-useable. If you watched his matches though from like his 3rd match on he was using the blade a lot more. The Spektrum solved his RF problems. He probably had a damaged futaba receiver.

R3 is the competition in september, right? how large is it compared to BBIQ? we thought about entering it last year but never did. we can this year if we want to enter the brick, or if we can get a new skirt for my flipper (and get a spektrum, or get the damn IFI to work). im not sure if ill even have time (or money) to do so though, since there are a lot of other things i have to do.

He kinda drove into that bad spot on the floor. His wedge popped up. His starter chain jammed the blade and well that force from the blade stopping created a nice moment/torque and flipped him right over. I'm not sure what happened to Alakran but one of their robots this year looked very similar to it.

ooh, yeah i know the floor wasnt really even, that caused us quite a few problems too. with a bot like that i can see how it would cause a lot of problems. what college was alakran from? i didnt know the college even came back for the competition again. what was the bot that looked similar to alakran? i dont remember seeing anything even close. or were you talking about that pneumatic flipper that kept getting caught on the floor? what i really loved about alakran was the clamping/flipping system, it was very well designed and amazingly effective.

I dont think it was much of an arrogant plan. If you met some of these girls they were quite nice. They probably just wanted to give something to teams they beat. I'm not so sure they ment it in a demeaning way though.

I dunno. I saw two of them work every day for two weeks straight on either that or their 15lb. For the rest of the team I can't speak though because the only faces/names I remember are the two that I helped. I'm sure that on a lot of the other days their team was there.

oh well, it doesnt matter at this point. it just seemed like one of those "haha, we beat you" kind of things. thats great if they did put in a lot of effort though. but what do you mean you saw them work every day for two weeks? the competition was less than a week, were you visiting Carrollton or something?

Yea. I apologize again. I should have written a much nicer *FIRST* reply rather than doing what I did. It's the same with guys. It happens on every team. I've felt the frustration of being on a huge FIRST team and then seeing some people just come along for the free trip. It's a problem that happens with every team/school. There isn't a real solution for it because you can argue that somehow those people are getting as much as THEY want out of the experience where as you are getting much more out of it because you want to. In the end it's all exposure to engineering that matters.

I know what youre talking about. especially since its junior year for most of the team, the majority of my team rarely showed up; i did about 95% of the work on my flipper, and the brick was done mostly by two seniors with some help from katie and david. im fine with that though, because everyone else actually did help when they did show up, and helped at the competition. with one exception. one kid joined the team at the beginning of the year and intended to create a mini bot, but he never did anything, he never even started designing it. he just melted solder to amuse himself. he went on the trip though, and the way our school is set up we couldnt really prevent it even though even our advisors didnt want him on the team. oh, and did i mention that he go on the trip with his mom, and room with his mom, but she wrote his documentation for him. i got so frustrated with him at one point i asked him what he had actually done for the team, and all he could say is "david told me to drill a few holes on the brick, but i drilled them in the wrong place so david had to redo it."

(theres one every year... and it seems to be getting progressively worse)

/rant.

personally, i think that someone should not be able to be on the team if they do not do work, or even try to work, when they are present, especially if they interfere with the team. it would have been much better if i could have just kicked him off the team. instead, i had to just talked loudly about drugs infront of his mom

Heh. I'm actually going to play on saturday =)

nice! i wasnt sure if you actually played, since it looked like you signed up for this thread. i wish i could play tomorrow, instead i have to take the SAT... but i am going to be playing in a tournament sunday.

And as far as finding this.. someone sent me the link and I'm not sure how they found it themselves.

hmm, google for the win? or does your friend play paintball?



my robotics teammate went to the competition with a very nice camera and took a lot of photos, about 1 GB actually. if he ever gets them to me, ill post some of them up online.

oh yeah, what college do you go to?

*edit* i forgot to ask, do you know who won the HS competition? i had to leave before it ended to make the flight, and still didnt get home until 2 AM. im assuming it was E2V2.

[slade]

Looks like an awesome program slade! The more I read about it, the more I would like to try it out.

I am very happy to see women in the program as well. It is important they are exposed to engineering as well. I don't mean to brag, but my team has doubled the amount of female members from last year and we have held assemblies for female students about female engineers.

I don't have pictures from Nationals to share with you. But we didn't have anything as cool as that. Our robot was too damn reliable. Nothing broke furing the entire 3-day period, so I had nothing to fix. I ended up sanding and polishing my cell phone as well fusing a vice with out work table with another team member.

you should try it out, it would be nice to see you at the competition. and it is great that there are women getting involved in battlebots in engineering, although itd be nice if it was from more than just that one school. our team has one girl, down 50% from last year. (because of that she got her own room too, i had to room with 3-4 guys and sleep on the floor )

heh, well everything on our robot was quite reliable with the exception of the IFI, but hey, everything becomes far less reliable in an arena with 40 pounds of titanium powered by 4 magmotors. that reminds me of another advantage of battlebots, it teaches you to design for high stress environments. im sure my bot would have been just fine for picking dasies, or whatever you do over there at FIRST (just kidding )

[Adriana]

[slade]

so aparently this thread has somehow been found by just about everyone who was at battlebots IQ. I thought i should post again to try to clarify some things; I misinterpreted some things, and think some of what i have said was misinterpreted.

first of all, aparently dark angel was talking about the old pretty in pink team. The team used to be a team of seniors and as checkmate said, this year a team of freshmen inherited the same bot with the same team name. the old team members didnt put in much work while the new team put in a lot of work in the limited time they were allowed. what i heard from lauren was about the old team, but i thought it was in referance to this years team. I unfortunately never met anyone on team pretty in pink so what i knew about them was just what i heard from others, and in retrospect i shouldnt have said anything. I would like to apologize to everyone on team pretty in pink as i posted based on a misinterpretation. I did not intend to offend anyone.

press coverage:

dark angel was on the front page of the miami herald, and our team's other bot (the brick) was mentioned in the article. it was sort of funny, the writer didnt know anything about battlebots, and really felt the need to draw attention to the catholic schoolgirls.

in case anyone was wondering, that was more a commentary on the way the media works than anything else. ive always found it funny how articles are written by and for people who dont know much about the subject, and the author draws attention to whatever will sell. i had no intention to discredit any of the girls teams at battlebots IQ.

that full bodied spinner did exceptionally well, even though its nothing special. hey, if you have 13 girls teams from one school, one has to do well, right?

as i already said, by "its nothing special" i meant that theres nothing that clearly stands out, like the fact that falcon was a titanium bot with a 50 lb drum, or excellerator 3 was titanium with 4 mag motors powering the shell. it was very well designed and implemented, and the girls on the team deserved the wins that they got. my "if you have 13 girls teams from one school, one has to do well" comment was a joke, as i said, which in retrospect i shouldnt have made. I can see why it wouldnt go over well with the girls teams, especially if they didnt realize that it was a joke. again, im sorry.

I dont think it was much of an arrogant plan. If you met some of these girls they were quite nice. They probably just wanted to give something to teams they beat. I'm not so sure they ment it in a demeaning way though.

at the time, as i already said, i thought team pretty in pink was a team that really hadnt put much effort in. i thought what lauren said was about this years team, not the old team. i tend to hate arrogance, and the way it appeared to me was that a team that hadnt put much effort in came to the competition acting arrogantly, and then didnt get to compete. in perspective now it doesnt seem as bad, and if it was more of a good humored joke, thats fine.

? i cant recall saying anything to discredit the people who set up the floor, i only really mentioned it in passing. i know that setting up the battlebox must have taken a lot of effort (and i saw the pile of empty red bulls underneath it). Although, the floor was more uneven than it was last year; your teammate mentioned that icewave lost a match because of the unevenness of the floor, and i know that when i set up my bot in the blue square, i had to offset it towards the right or risk it getting caught on the intersection between two parts of the floor. I love battlebots IQ, and know that it takes a lot of effort to put together and run, i was just a bit annoyed with some aspects of how it was run, as i already said.

2: College teams did compete and have been competing since BBIQ 3.0. The college teams that competed this year were

Carnegie Mellon: Revenant
FIU: Checkmate/Chernobyl
UM: Hurricane Katrina/The Shocker
Tulane: Icewave
Polytech of PR: Black Thunder
University of RP: Manta Raya/Guazabara
Missouri State" bear Necessity
Worcester: Brutality
Dunwoody: Lunatic

why did you bring this up? i know college teams have been competing for a while. i just asked what school checkmate was from.

and in regards to:
" but what do you mean you saw them work every day for two weeks? the competition was less than a week, were you visiting Carrollton or something?"

-Where Checkmate is built, is also where all the Carrollton robots are built. To say the least, Pretty and Pink lived there the last two weeks. With help coming from Sergio, Jesus, myself, parents, and adult supervisors, the girls were able to get their robot together and compete. Even though they did not do amazing, to say they got there is more then enough. Those girls worked really hard, and their dedication to that robot and determination to compete blew me away.

-Adriana

ahh, i guess that had me confused because all our bots are built in the school. as i already said though, what i said about team pretty in pink was a misinterpretation, and i wish i hadnt said anything.