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Tomorrow, on Wednesday, March 12 at 9:00 AM sharp, Orange Chaos will be loading up our new trailer and heading out to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts with out new friends/competition from Old Town. We're dying to show off our new technological advancement... Natasha! She's got a bigger job than Sasha. Literally. This year, for those who don't yet know, is all about teamwork. Our drivers will have to coordinate with robots from two other teams, not to mention the human players, to get two-feet-wide balls into the goals while avoiding enemy aggression. It's a bit more complicated than shooting disks, but we're ready to go! Wish us luck!
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 Today Rookie Team 5122 from Old Town High School joined us for time in the gym. The team enjoyed checking out their new robot, practicing passes and pick ups, working with the human player and just having fun. Old Town tried out the new double ball autonomous mode and worked out a few bugs. We made a few adjustments to Natasha, practiced autonomous mode and the Drive Team had a lot of practice time. Check out the fun below! Today a small group of team members and mentors tackled putting a vinyl wrap on our team trailer. HUGE Thank You's to Dale Averill owner of DA1 Design, for designing the wrap and helping with the installation. Warren Kelly, owner of Kelly's Sport Shop in Orrington for allowing us to use his garage. This was a tricky project, but the results look amazing! Thank you everyone for all your hard work! And a BIG Thank You again to the Air Force, Sargeant Vance, and Master Sergeant Barber for the donation of our trailer.  New this year, FIRST is allowing 6 hours of prep time with our robots prior to competitions. Thursday was our first unbagging before our competition at WPI. To make the best of our time we created a project plan and assigned jobs to team members last Sunday. Thursday night Shawn reviewed assignments, everyone knew their jobs, and all tools and equipment were ready to go the minute Natasha came out of the bag! The team made quick work of adjustments to the thrower arm, and with new software uploaded and a bit of debugging, Natasha was ready to go. The thrower was working well, but the bubble of excitement burst after a few throws when the ball punctured and slowly deflated. Duct Tape to the rescue!! See more of our nights adventures below.  CAD Mentor and number painter extraordinaire Dana hard at work! Thank you!
Tuesday the 18th was the last day of our 6 week build season. We invited family and friends to get a sneak peek at Natasha before Bag and Tag tonight. We want to specially thank Wes Archer from Lane for attending and for all their help fabricating parts, Natasha would not be looking and working so awesome without your help! We also want to thank Superintendent Jay McIntire and family, School Board Chairwoman Janet McIntosh, and Brian MacDonald, Director of Facilities, for joining us. The team appreciates all your support!  Bagged and Tagged before Midnight! On Saturday 2/8 a few members of the team got together to take part in a bottle drive to raise funds for the WPI regional trip. It was a pretty productive day and in our travels from house to house we still found a lot of people that don't know about FIRST robotics or the Brewer High Team, so it was a great way for us to also get out and talk about our program. So far January has been extremely hectic but it's going well. The team has been organized and attendance has been really high as we have worked through brainstorming and prototyping and starting the build. With about three weeks left we are in pretty good shape - we like how the design is coming together and it's pretty neat to see us trying things that we didn't do last year. The build team was able to use parts from an old robot to quickly do some prototyping of the throwing mechanism that we will shoot and pass with. It is basically a catapult type design right now that will work with motors and springs to get enough force to throw the game ball where we want. Prototyping the device to pick up the ball has gone through a lot more work. The original idea worked great but we couldn't integrate it with the thrower well. The frame perimeter rules are really annoying sometimes !!! The programming team has kept up with what the builders are doing and putting the structure in place while the robot is getting built. We hope to use sensors this year to identify the hot zone, give us some indications of distance, and make our robot a lot smarter than the one we had last year. Below please find some pictures of how the team has been doing - from the January 4th kickoff in South Portland up until the end of February.  Good food, good friends and robots to build! What a great day. 
 Team SMART assemble a pneumatic system with the help of Orange Chaos team members. Orange Chaos team members and mentors traveled to Jay to teach pneumatics to a fellow Maine team. 
 Dan Lemeaux from team SMART, Spruce Mt HS, in Jay drove up Tuesday evening to host CAD training for our team. Dan's instruction built a good foundation in CAD for the team. CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) will be a great addition to the teams tool box of skills and a skill every engineer and technical person will utilize in their career. 
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Brewer FIRST2013 Inaugural Team Archives
March 2014
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