On Sunday, August 17th, the team went to the Concours D' Elegance Auto show in Pebble Beach to sell concessions for fundraising. We made over $600, despite the bad weather. Hopefully we can earn more money at our Fleet Week event in October!

On Wednesday, August 13th, the Lynbrook Robotics team visited Sony Electronics, a local sponsor, to thank the corporation for their support. Members talked about the club's accomplishments and experiences for the past season. The team also demonstrated the 2008 FRC robot, which was an exciting highlight for the Sony employees.

The Lynbrook Robotics Team competed in the International Autonomous Robot Competition held at the San Diego County Fair from June 21st to 22nd. The team worked to the last minute working on their iRobot Create’s java code to solve a maze autonomously. Although we were not able to execute our optimal path finder program, we were able to complete the Urban Challenge maze by using distance sensors. The Gold Rush event presented us with some unexpected challenges and we were unable to reach the goal in time. The team received the second highest score for the technical presentation aspect of the competition; thus, placing the Funky Monkeys in 4th place overall. Congratulations to Torrey Pines High School for a well earned 1st place in the senior division. Other bay area teams competing included Gunn and Monta Vista High School.

Special thanks to Eric Arseneau for helping our team and to the Wintress’ for making the competition happen. The competition was a great learning experience for all of the members.

For some pictures of the competition, click here.

The Robotics Team's seniors graduated from Lynbrook High School on Thursday, June 12th. Several of our underclassmen presented them with farewell gifts as they said goodbye to them.

Congrats Eaglebots on their excellent performance at the Botball regional! With almost nothing to compete with a week ago, the Eaglebots pulled it together in the last few days. In the seeding rounds, team 0131 had a couple of great runs, putting them in fourth place! The other teams weren't as successful early in the morning, but as the day went along, they did a lot better. Out of the 27 teams present, 12 went on to compete in the final bracket. Eaglebots 0131 was undefeated going into the round, and 0132 had one loss but were still in the running. Our first couple of games in the finals were pretty good although 0132 was knocked out immediately. We consistently got big points for knocking the bridge down. In one game we couldn't get the bridge down, and that led to our first loss. Two games later, the same thing happened and we were eliminated. The teams all did a great job. Here are the awards we won.

Judges Choice: Sportsmanship Team 0131
Judges Choice: Reliability Team 0131
Finalist: 12^th place Team 0132
Finalist: 5^th place Team 0131
Overall: 6^th place Team 0131
Participation: All teams

Editor's Note [D.Giandomenico]:
Lynbrook's Funky Monkeys lent a hand to the Oak Grove HS Eaglebots again in the 2008 Botball Competition. Oak Grove fielded three teams, #0130, 0131, and 0132, to compete at the Northern California Regional held at Santa Clara University April 19, 2008. Lynbrook Robotics freshman Chinmay Jaju (in photo above with blue vest) helped bring the three teams up to speed in a final push just one week before the competition and served as the teams' leader during the event.

Congratulations to the senior members of Lynbrook Robotics, Class of 2008, for their acceptances into prestigious universities, including: Brown, Caltech, Georgia Tech, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, UCLA, and Yale!

Chinmay Jaju, freshmen member of the Lynbrook Robotics Team, placed second in the tryouts for the US Team for Free Flight Model Aircraft, earning him the right to compete in July 2008 at the FAI Junior World Championships in Kiev, Ukraine! Chinmay has been building model aircraft since the sixth grade under the instruction of mentor Bill Vanderbeek. Free Flight aircraft operate autonomously, that is, without human control. His skills will be in high demand on our robotics team!

Web article by E.Crofton at the Cupertino Courier Newspaper, Wed April 2, 2008.
PDF with photos by J.Ramseyer at the Courier archives (very slow); cached (faster).

Congratulations to the Lynbrook Robotics Team for their wonderful performance at the first-ever Hawaii Regional!

We arrived in Honolulu early Wednesday afternoon, where we settled in at our hotel and explored the Waikiki area. In Thursday's practice rounds, we spent time practicing our driving and tuning our robot and software.

On Friday, we performed well in the qualification rounds. We were happy to be awarded the Judges' Award for our "innovative suction system, dithered brake steering," among other features such as our "dual LED operator hats".

That evening, we were treated to an amazing luau with Hawaiian foods such as poi. Entertainment included music, dancers, a hula competition, and a grand finale by fire spinners.

On Saturday, we were seeded 6th after finishing the qualification rounds, and we were chosen by the #4 seed, team 2024 of Waiakea High. We also invited team 2460 of Kohala High School to join us. Our alliance's performance was amazing; we got to semifinals in the elimination rounds, but after three close, hard matches, we lost to the #1 alliance, who went on to become the regional champions.

After the competition on Saturday night, we had a team dinner at the Oceanarium restaurant, where we ate by an extravagant 3-story high aquarium, and celebrated a member's birthday.

The trip was enjoyable for everyone that participated. We spent Sunday enjoying the beautiful tropical weather. We went snorkeling at Hanauma Bay, which was a new experience for many of us. In the afternoon, we took a scenic hike up Diamond Head, with a few people deciding to run up the entire trail.

Congratulations team 846 for an amazingly fun and exciting conclusion to the 2008 FIRST season!

Charles Lin, Co-President of Lynbrook Robotics won bronze at the International Shuai-Chiao Martial Arts Tournament in Shanghai, China. The competition drew teams from 12 countries. Charles has been studying shuai-chiao since he was ten at the Cupertino Kung Fu Club. Jan-Yu Weng, Charles' coach, describes him as "a model student, athlete, and leader."

On our robotics team, Charles served as field coach at both the 2008 Silicon Valley and Hawaii Regionals, where his martial arts expertise that requires quick decisive moves under pressure helped our drivers stay keep their cools and focus during the intense competitions.
Congrats Charles!

Webstory by E.Doolittle with photos by G.Sakkestad (Saratoga News / Mercury News) 03/25/2008

Congratulations to team 846, specifically the software team for winning the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award at the Silicon Valley Regional. This award was given to us mainly because of our Dithered Braking System devised by the software team.
The team seeded 6th at the end of qualification matches and ended up captaining the 5th alliance of 2035 and 972 into the semi-finals where we lost to the eventual champions made up of team 100, 254, and 115.

Here is a video of the team's robot in action:

Robot Video

We practiced with the robot on team 254's field at NASA AMES.

On Sunday, February 17, the team tried out the robot at team 254's field at NASA Ames. Here is a video of the robot hurldling the trackball:

Hurdling Video

Congratulations to one of our member and ex-co president, Caroline Suen for becoming a Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist!

On Saturday, January 12, the Dilworth (Brainiacs) and Miller (X-Bots) FIRST LEGO League teams competed at the NCaFLL Tournament at Newark High School.
64 competitive teams from around the state participated in the event. The Brainiacs earned the Gracious Professionalism Award, while the X-Bots received the Consistency Award (sponsored by Leland HS Robotics).

On Sunday the 23rd, the Fremont FLL Regional Qualifying Tournament took place at Ahlone College. Dilworth's team, the Brainiacs, and Miller's team, the X-BOTS were two of the 21 team participating.
Each team had 3 matches and the highest possible score was 400 points:
Team: Match Scores (1,2,3)
Brainiacs: 285, 300, 285
X-BOTS: 220, 360, 370

The two teams earned the only three 300+ point scores during the whole competition.

Awards:
Robot Design (1st, 2nd)
Robot Peformance (1st, 2nd)
Research Presentation (1st, 2nd)
Teamwork (1st, 2nd)
Judges Award (2)
Champion's Award (our Chairman's equivalent)

All awards come with a nice plaque.
The winner of the Robot Performance Award is determined based on the team's highest two scores. All the other awards are based on judging, and the Champion's Award is awarded to the team with the highest total scores in all four areas: (4 areas: Design, Performance, Presentation, Teamwork, 25 points each, 100 possible total). This is the most prestigious award given.

X-BOTS won 1st Place Robot Performance
Brainiacs won 2nd Place Robot Performance

Also:

X-BOTS won 2nd Place Robot Design
Brainiacs won *Champion's Award*

Both teams advance to the state level, so they will be competing again sometime next month.
It was a really great competition and both teams enjoyed it.

Hey everyone,

I just got back from the first VEX programming meeting and it was a big success! Five students come to the meeting today, and Mr. G brought the VEX cars and helped out. They programmed the VEX controllers on the R/C cars, which was an exciting platform for them to work on.

I prepared sample code followed by exercises of increasing difficulty. I started with an example program of having two buttons on the controller drive the car forwards/backwards, and we discussed the details of the ESCs (speed controllers). They then followed the example to cause another set of buttons to turn the wheels left and right.

The next exercise was to use the joysticks to drive the car. They found that left and right were reversed, and figured out how to switch them to make the car drive correctly.

Next I introduced them to keeping state in the programming, beginning with running the motor while maintaining a simple timer. The final project was to write a program to execute something a three-point turn. This involved writing a series of actions and code to trigger them one in sequence, which is exactly what we do in autonomous programming. Some of the students even added their own enhancements to the program.

Preparation for this took a long time, but it made the meeting go very smoothly and gave us a lot of time to work on programming. I spent several hours installing the software on the computers three weeks ago, and I wrote and tested the sample code + exercises over this past week.

Overall it was a really good opportunity for them to start programming hands-on. They learned how to solve common problems that come up when setting up and programming the VEX. This is valuable experience that will help when programming the FIRST controller as well, which is essentially the same.

The next meeting is scheduled for Monday 11/26.

David

P.S. For the record, the students that attended were:
Indranil Bua
Chinmay Jaju
Alexander J. Lin
Dennis Liaw
Felix Sung

Laser Quest Social

Hey everyone,

For those who missed out on our Laser Quest Social, you missed one uberly awesome event. Congrats to Yuya for getting 1st in the Team mission with 935 points even though the upper classmen won, Daiwei for getting 1st in the Frantic mission with 1052 points, and me (yay) for getting 1st in the regular Solo mission with 1033 points

Be sure to attend next years Laser Quest Socials and any social that may come up throughout the year so you can take part in all the fun.=)

On Saturday October 13, the Lynbrook Robotics team competed at the CalGames competition at Woodside High School. After earning a 4-1 record, the team allied with team 604 and 675 for the elimination matches. The team quickly advanced to the semifinals but were defeated by the first seed alliance composing of teams 254, 100, and 852. Nonetheless, the robot performed well, scoring on all three levels of the rack, including three keepers in autonomous mode.

Team 846 with team 604, Leland High School:

Hey yall,

Great job to everyone who helped out at Fleetweek and a special thanks to the parents that gave rides and voulenteered.

For those that don't know, Fleetweek is an annual event that takes place at several major ports, in the US including San Francisco, to honor the men and woman that fought to protect the US. There are all sorts of Army, Navy and Coast Guard performances including the Blue Angels.

We as a club sell snacks and merchandise to raise money for the upcoming year and Fleetweek is our biggest fundraising event so its is important to make it a success. So, thank you to everyone that came and voulenteered.

On the morning of September 15th, the Lynbrook Robotics Team attended the annual WRRF Robotics Workshops which were held at Santa Clara University. There, robotics team members were able to listen to various workshops on subjects such as DC motors, 3D studio max, robot controller and programming software tools, and electronics. Mr. Giandomenico, a Lynbrook Robotics advisor, led the highly successful workshop on DC motors.

After the morning sessions and a brief lunch break, students, parents and mentors from different teams across the Bay Area came together for panel discussions on topics including Team Dynamics and Fundraising. Lynbrook Robotics Team PR officer, Manisha Vasishta, was actually one of the participants on the panel.

Students found the WRRF workshops to be educational and interesting. Senior Charles Lin said, "I would definitely want to come back to another one of these workshops. The 3D studio max workshop was really interesting!" The workshops were a great way to help new members get into robotics. Hopefully there will be another WRRF workshop soon!