Members of Team Phoenix attended the Oklahoma City Regional of the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) on March 17th & 18th.  We were there only as observers--the cost of fielding an FRC team starts at about $8k-$10k--but it was still a good thing to go see.

One recurring theme that does not seem, to me at least, to be such a good idea is to have only 6 weeks or so to design, build, test, and compete with a robot.  FRC does this, BEST does this, and several others do as well.  The idea is to simula...
Continue reading ...

As was mentioned earlier, we participated in the 2011 APEC MicroMouse competition, held at the Ft. Worth Convention Center. 

First off, the convention center there is HUGE!  It could probably host the Democratic or Republican National Conventions in a presidential election year--it's that big.  We finally found where we needed to be, about an hour early, just as the APEC folks were about to start setting up the competition field.

In the earlier post, I compared our robot to the others competin...
Continue reading ...

OK, just a quick update . . . I'll have to post a more in-depth update later.

First off, the APEC MicroMouse contest went great! We didn't win, though; our entry was sort of like a '62 Chevy pickup entered in the Monaco Grand Prix.  Still, it was a lot of fun, and we managed to impress the world-class competition with our robot and our extremely limited programming experience.

We're also getting ready to attend (but not compete, not this year, anyway) in the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) compe...
Continue reading ...