The CocoNuts Robotics "News Feed"

AZ FTC State Chamionship= at school Fiday until 10pm, wake up next day at 5:30am, leave school at uhhh- what time is it again? But, to be honest, it is worth every minute. For those who don’t know, the CocoNuts are the FTC Affiliate Partners for Arizona, which means we host the FTC kick-off, work shops, scrimmage, and state tounament. This year we had some amazing turn out, with 22 teams in attendance from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and California. We even had a team registered to attend from Mexico, but unfortunetly they couldn’t make the actual tournament. Next year, the event is going to grow so large we will have to run two divisions, which mean double the fields, materials, and voulenteers, but we couldn’t be more delighted.
We had a really great time today with some very competitive teams robot-wise, as well as in the running for awards like the Inspire Award, which is for just that, a team that inspires others. So, thank you to all the teams we saw today, you all truely did great, and congrats to the two teams that will be progressing on to the World Championships in April. The two teams were team 2844 (Valley-X), winning the Inspire Award, and team 4314 (Aero Squadron) was the winning alliance captian.
So, thank you again to everyone who was there, if you couldn’t make it, some videos will be up on our YouTube channel soon. It was great to see what a positive impact we have on people, and it was for sure worth giving up two build days.

Go Nuts!!
31 Days Until Ship!!

P.s. I’m pretty sure that I have lost count of how many days until ship, so don’t count on that number! :D

For most students there wasn’t school today, but why would anyone on the CocoNuts take that into consideration? For us it just means and extra, much needed work day! Greeted this morning by a few inches of snow we reported promptly at the school at 10 am. We got started quickly on prototyping a launcher for the basket ball (video will be up on our youtube channel soon). The programming team got to work on field oriented drive and completed that task successfully, so awsome!! We are really excited for this season! The game is going to be great and we are looking forward to score some coopertition points! Happy Building!

Go Nuts!
33 Days Unitl Ship!

The build season certainly is hurrying along, but we have been getting quite a bit done. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from feeling like we are still behind. On the robot front: We have been doing some prototyping for both our shooter and ball picker upper (for lack of a better term) mechanism. We’ve decided to go with a simple 4 wheel mecanum drive train, and we have been busy milling the wheel mounts for them. On the Awards front: Chairman’s Essay is in a finalized rough draft stage, the video is being story-boarded, and the judge’s handout is about a quarter of the way done too! Programming team was able to get their camera to track the reflective square and also able to partially drive the robot locked on the target, we are also working with a gyro to get a robot to be field oriented! We are really off to a great start! Next weekend, January 21st, we will be hosting the Arizona FTC Championships! The event is free at Coconino High School from 10:30am-5:30pm. Hope to see everyone there!

Go Nuts!
35 days until ship!

P.S. In case you didn’t see the FRC game this year, here’s the link to the game animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNkjpd7mYBs

Well it appears that the 2012 FRC season is upon us! After getting up early this morning to watch the Kick-Off Live Stream which is viewed simultaneously by FIRST Teams all over the world, we have began our work on our robot. This years game, “Rebound Rumble” should be reallllllly interesting. Personally, I am really excited about the Xbox kinect that was included in the kit. I just wish we had mini-bots again this year. Oh well, it should be a blast! Go Luck!

Go Nuts!

42 Days Until Ship!

After the controlled chaos of FIRST in Atlanta, the CocoNuts have settled into calmer, but just as important, pursuits: namely teaching the Northern Arizona University Summer Enrichment Program (NAU SEP) “Spirit and Opportunity” section for the second year in a row. The CocoNuts teach their “made-from-scratch” Mars rover based curriculum using LEGO Mindstorms Robot Kits (a.k.a. – FLL bots).

So, if you want to see the CocoNuts putting STEM into action, stop by the NAU College of Education, Rm 174, between 6-8 PM, June 2-8 or June 12-18.

GO NUTS!

Once again, through the overwhelming generosity of the community of Flagstaff and Northern Arizona, the CocoNuts will be attending the FIRST World Championships in Atlanta, Georgia!!!

This year we made it every team member’s individual responsibility to raise funds for their portion of the travel cost (plane, hotel, etc.) to Atlanta. So we decided to have a spaghetti dinner and raffle, and every member went going around town selling raffle and spaghetti dinner tickets. We received raffle item donations from over 50 local businesses, and we even had all our spaghetti/food related items donated as well! In total our spaghetti dinner and raffle netted $3700!! Members also solicited their friends and family for Arizona Public School Tax Credits to our team. We also had school hat days, car-washes and other miscellaneous fundraisers. As of today every member had funded their own trip ($480), with some going above and beyond (one by the thousands!).

We will be leaving Coconino High School at 4AM tomorrow for our 7:59AM flight from Sky Harbor in Phoenix to Atlanta. It won’t be until Sunday that we return, so no guarantees on new blog posts in Atlanta.

The CocoNuts are proud to represent Coconino High School—the city of Flagstaff—Coconino County—all of Northern Arizona—and the entire Southwest region at the FIRST World Championships. It is inspiring to see our outreach in our community be reciprocated by the kindness and support that our community shows for our team, and we hope to do you proud in Atlanta.

GO NUTS!

It’s official! The CocoNuts have once again qualified for the FIRST World Championship in Atlanta, GA through their reciept of of the Engineering Inspiration Award at the Arizona FIRST Robotics Competition Regional! This is the second highest award given out at regionals after the Chairman’s Award. This year the CocoNuts, in competition for the Chairman’s Award, were beaten by a decades old Hawaiian team, with a budget of upwards of $750,000 (in comparison to the CocoNuts $25,000)

Additionally, CocoNuts team member Tomas Zukowski was one of two recipients of the first annual Arizona FRC Regional Dean’s List Award. He will now compete at the international level with 89 other finalists at the FIRST World Championship for one of ten awards. Perks of winning this include: a waived registration fee for the recipient’s team, a week-long all-expenses-paid Leadership Seminar at FIRST Headquarters in New Hampshire, and a personal letter of recommendation from FIRST leadership to a college or employer of their choice.

In addition, the CocoNuts made it into the semi-finals of the competition as part of the fourth-seeded alliance, which was nicknamed “Team Arizona.” (Go Falcons and Team Caution!)

We’re steeping up our game in every aspect of our team!

When everything seems funny and you can’t stop laughing, you know it’s been a long day. We started off right after school frantically trying to finish wiring our bot so that we could drive our robot in our last school basketball game.   We did it though!

-burlymon

As we have decided as a team that we would like to attend the Duel in the Desert, we now have one less week to finish our  robot!  We agreed that it is probably a smart idea to go to this scimmage because we will only be attending the AZ Regional, and we want to have as much practice playing Breakaway as we can.  We are going to have to devide and conquer in order to get the bot built and the CA application finished, but we will manage!

-burlymon

Here we are, another weekend ahead of us and probably three days of 10+ hour build sessions.

The snow has let up enough that we were finally able to get our much needed bearings shipped up from Phoenix in the middle of the week, and our pistons for our kicker just came in today.  We have outlined all that we need to include in our Chairman’s Award essay, and decided on theme for our CA stuff this year.  Our robot chassis is beginning to take shape, and we are all feeling better about things because of it.  I wonder how far the Falcons (842) are in in their build, their prototyping proved helpful to us, and we did a bit of prototyping of our own.  Oh! And I came up with a new possible cheer for our team for this season.  Ready?!  “They ain’t no klutzes, they ain’t no schmutzes, O! Godness Gracious Me!  They’re the CocoNutzes!!!” Yeah, I guess it probably needs some work.

Hopefully, we get a bunch done this weekend!

-burlymon

GO NUTS!