Wow! We are now busy resting up from an intense 3 days of the Granite State Regional. It was an amazing experience for all those on the team. Thursday morning we made several additions to our robot that we had shipped to catch it up to our practice 'bot at home. Throughout Thursday we practiced with and tuned our ball vacuum and kicker so that we were ready for play on Friday. On Friday we won 4 of our 6 matches and ended the day in 18th place with 46 ranking points. During Friday's award ceremony we were honored to receive the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control award recognizing our effective system to sense and possess balls, and our utilization of it in autonomous mode!

Saturday morning we had 4 more rounds of which we won 2. This put us in 7th place going into the alliance selection process. We were picked by the 2nd seeded The Force Team (1073) who then selected The PVC Pirates (1058) to complete our alliance. Our alliance worked well together as we were each able to effectively play our zone. Our team played defense for most of the eliminations after we had moved the 3 starting balls out of the zone in autonomous. We won the quarter and semi-finals in two matches each.

In the finals we faced the 1st seeded alliance comprised of 1922, 78, and 134. They proved to be fierce competition especially with 78's incredible elevating mechanism which guaranteed their alliance two points at the end of the match. We won the first match decisively but in the second match they earned a tie in the last seconds of the match by scoring one last ball and by 78 hanging. Our opponents won the third match by once again scoring 2 points for hanging at the end. Coming into the 4th match of the finals each alliance had a win and was working their hardest to bring home the gold. In this final match our drivers were able to tenaciously defend such that 134 and 78 were unable to score for almost the entire match. This gave us the last win 11-2, and named our alliance the Granite State Regional Champions for 2010!

At the award ceremony we were very excited when one of our seniors won the new Deans list award. Nathan S. has been on the team for 5 years and has had a huge impact on all of our team members, and we are pleased that his leadership contributions to our team can be recognized in the greater FIRST community.

We are now making preparations to attend the Championship Event in Atlanta, GA, April 15-17 as well as the North Carolina Regional April 1-3, and we are excited to continue to compete with our robot this year.

On Saturday afternoon, we headed up to St. Paul's School in Concord, NH, to take advantage of Team 1512's generous offer for us to use their indoor, heated practice field!

We spent about 8 hours testing our practice robot and accomplished all of our objectives for the day:
    1. robustness testing of the drivetrain, kicker, and ball vacuum;

    2. driver and kicker operator tryouts;

    3. autonomous program development and testing.

We even managed to capture a short video of our robot scoring 3 balls in autonomous mode from the furthest zone on the field.

Our robot is now on its way to the Granite State Regional! Yesterday at about 5:45 FedEx came by and picked up our crate with a mostly functioning robot. Having worked almost around the clock since Friday, we had our iteration 4 robot driving around at 3am Tuesday morning and packed in the crate at 3pm. We did not ship our kicker and are still continuing to work on it as well as a new ball possessor mechanism.

Last Friday evening we attended an unveiling event hosted by BAE Systems and team 151, the Tough Techs of Nashua. It was a fairly successful night; we had our robot both driving and kicking as did many of the other 29 teams in attendance. We also were able to learn from some of the other teams there, resulting in our starting yet another iteration of brainstorming, prototyping, and testing to design a new ball possession mechanism utilizing a vacuum impeller to control the ball on the field.

We are now busily working on this year's robot. We decided to have an iterative schedule this year such that we would build 4 iterations of our robot throughout the build season. As usual we are slightly behind schedule since we have not quite completed iteration 2. We do however have a working drive base with complete electronic and pneumatics systems. We have brought our base to our practice area a couple of times and have worked on traversing bumps.

We have been exploring using the CAN bus for controlling the Jaguars this year but have been running into some difficulties with it. We also have been doing some work with getting the camera image on the Driver Station, but we have found that it has a significant delay such that it will probably not be possible to drive solely from it yet it will be helpful in order to see into the driver's blind spots such as behind the bumps or other robots.

With only 17 days left of build season and only 12 days till the deadline for this site and the Chairman's award submission, we are eagerly working to finish everything on time!

Bash at the Beach was our first fall tournament, and a small but eager crew made the trip down to Connecticut. New students took on some of the drive team roles.

River Rage always brings a mix of emotions, as the game that was announced almost 10 months before is played for the last time. We all have one last chance to see what our robot can do.

It was a great opportunity for some of the new team members to participate in a competition for the first time, and they were brimming with excitement. This year we gave every student that attended a turn on the drive team, and had a student do all of the drive coaching.

This year River Rage played the Lunacy game in a 2 on 2 format, with no outpost stations used. This insured that all human players had an ample supply of balls, and the chance to score a super cell. The field included quite a few high quality machines and teams, many of which could score faster than our robot could. We found ourselves working hard to shut down the more dangerous machines. In a peculiar twist of scheduling, out of the 26 teams in attendance we were scheduled to compete against the Force team (1073) in 4 of our 6 qualification matches. Although they could score effectively, we discovered that our traction control was more effective, and three times we ended up pinning their robot in a corner where a human player from our alliance could have their way with them. Because the schedule was running behind we did not get to face them for that final qualification match, but it was already enough. We went 4-0-1 and took top seed. We selected Gael Force (126) as a partner and moved into the double elimination playoff. We made it to the finals of the Winners bracket before succumbing to CHAOS (Team 131) and the Funk Zombies (1474, Tewksbury Titans) After a brief detour through the top of the loser's bracket, we faced CHAOS and the Funk Zombies again for a best two of three final. Again they got the better of us, but by a narrower margin. We continued to learn how to defend CHAOS, finally getting the best of them in the second playoff match. By the final match, we and Gael Force had mastered the midfield two-on-one pin, and were able to run away with the match and the tournament! An amazing finish to an amazing year!

Different from past years, we started the post-season with Battle Cry at WPI. Usually that is where we peak as a team, after GSR and a couple of other post-season events, but this year Battle Cry was held early (and Beantown Blitz was not held) due to interfering work on the respective facilities. We went 4-3-0 in the qualifying rounds and lost in the quarterfinals.


Mayhem in Merrimack was the next competition in the spring. It is always one of our favorite tournaments! For several years we have tried to have a second robot available so more of the team members could compete. But this year, scheduling turned out to be very challenging, with more than half of the team involved with SAT testing that day. Only three students (Sarah, Brittany, and David G) were available to compete, none of whom had previously been on the drive team in competition. Fortunately Brittany's younger sister Lindsay came to watch, in our second match she was pressed into service as the second human player for our alliance. Welcome to the team, Lindsay! This brave group brought our robot in at #4 seed out of 17.

By late in the day many of our team members had escaped from testing and trickled in, with the Francoeur ladies passing the human player role on to Justin, and David passing the driving to Tim while David also did some human player work. In the playoffs we chose the PVC Pirates, had two ties, and ultimately made it to the final match of the losers bracket before bowing out to the #2 alliance. The robot continued to operate mechanically without major issues, although the lighting and some software issues forced us to rely on manual targeting nearly all day.

We continued to work on the shooting ability of the #2 robot to get ready for Nationals. With thanks to Team 40 and their sponsors we also got in a bit more practice at their reconstructed field. Upon arrival in Atlanta we modified the #1 robot to catch up with the one at home.

We started off with a loss in our first match, but amazingly went on to win the next 5, rising high in the rankings. Our focus shifted from marketing ourselves to preparing in the event we would lead an alliance. But in the next to last qualification match on Curie we stumbled. We dropped to the low teens in the standings. Alliance selection was somewhat disappointing, since we were passed over. As the third highest ranked, unselected, team we were asked to stand by as an emergency replacement for the playoffs, but we were not called.