On the weekend of March 1-2, we attended the Granite State Competition at Salem High School in Salem, NH, taking home an overall rank of 4th!

A few very special guests gave speeches before the event started, including FIRST founder Dean Kamen, New Hampshire Education Director Frank Edelblut, New Hampshire congresswoman Maggie Goodlander, and New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte.

Team member Yonatan had the opportunity to interview Dean Kamen. Mr. Kamen expressed his pleasure seeing politicians of different political parties using FIRST’s core value of “coopertition” to support FIRST robotics students. He then said that when students discover FIRST, they could go from not being interested in STEAM at all to being very interested, and that FIRST is “Not only really accessible, it’s not only really fun, it could be the start of a fantastic career”. Mr. Kamen closed by expressing that he admires how FIRST alumni become very successful in STEAM and in society as a whole.

After the speeches wrapped up, we started the qualifying matches. Our scouters were hard at work watching other teams’ movements to help our strategy team decide who to select as alliance partners in the playoffs. The qualifying matches were stressful for our drive team as we had a very tough schedule, facing off against strong teams such as Windham Windup and Mechanical Advantage on multiple occasions. Drive team member Liam said it was “a little unlucky, but we’ll do our best and just kinda win all our matches”. On top of that, we had a lot of matches with short breaks in between. While this was a setback, pit crew member Eliot said “we got done all the things that we set out to achieve”. In the end, we beat the odds and won 9 out of our 12 qualifying matches.

On Sunday, after the final qualification match, we went into alliance selection. We were ranked 4th, meaning we were captain of the 4th alliance. However, we happily gave up our position to join the alliance 2 captain, team 4909 (Bionics). Team 1512, The Big Red, rounded out our alliance as the third member. We fought our way through the upper bracket to the finals but we were ultimately defeated by alliance 1, consisting of team 9443 (Aluminum Panthers), team 6328 (Mechanical Advantage), and team 3467 (Windham Windup). For our hard work, we were awarded the Finalist Award.

We also won the Autonomous Award, an award presented to a team with the most effective autonomous programming. The judges said we “demonstrated a clear ability to reliably score coral in autonomous mode with a robust, reliable approach”. In the end, we are feeling great after our top position and awards. We hope to keep it up at our next competition at UNH on March 22-23!

The LigerBots hosted an Impact Exchange at the Granite State Event! Blogpost Coming Soon

On February 28, The LigerBots were generously invited by the Burr Parent Teacher Organization to the school’s STEAM fair.

At the fair’s opening, we showcased our many STEAM activities from binary beads to coloring. These STEAM activities are meant to help kids engage in topics relating to science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics.

We also showed off our 2022 robot to the attendees of the fair. Overall, we answered questions related to the robot, explained its basic functions, and how it works.

The attendees also had the opportunity to interact with the 2022 robot. This was meant to showcase the myriad of possibilities available to them. If they continued to pursue their knowledge on STEAM.

Stay tuned for our exciting upcoming events, including our many upcoming competitions!

On February 15, the LigerBots won the Week 0 pre-season competition at Merrimack High School in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

In this year’s game, robots need to score with two different game pieces, one a PVC pipe called “coral” and the other a green playground ball called “algae”. We were excited to compete with our robot, which we named Hydra! Hydra was designed and built over the past 8 weeks, based on many different designs by our team members to compete in this competition.

The night before the competition, we loaded Hydra into theLigerBots trailer for transport. Early the next morning, over 30 team members were transported via carpools from Starbucks in Newtonville to Merrimack High School.

We competed in four of the 16 qualifying matches, winning three. As the #1 ranked team, we led the top alliance and selected Team 190 (Gompei and the Herd) and Team 5422 (Stormgears). Our alliance won every playoff match, securing both the event championship and our team’s #1 overall ranking out of the 31 teams.

We learned a lot from this competition! In particular, our climber needs more tuning so that it can be more consistent, and our power chain needs to be reinforced more. But more importantly, we know this season is going to rock! This was the best possible way to warm up for the upcoming competition season and we hope to do just as well at the next few competitions. Our first official competition, Granite State hosted by ……., is on March 1-2 in Salem, NH. Join us in person or on the livestream!

This season, we designed and built a new robot named Hydra to compete in this year’s FRC game, Reefscape.

** If you’re interested in learning more about our kickoff, click this! **

To kick off the build season, the team watched a reveal video of the game. We then split into small groups to begin mechanism designing for the next 3 days. Once every group presented their ideas, our team started building the robot. It’s sure to be a stressful journey, as we have only 7 weeks before our first competition!

“We’re trying to stay on track so we can have a working robot for competition” said Zach H, Robot driver

We purchased the MK4I Swerve drive from a vendor called SDS (Swerve Drive Specialties) to allow the robot to move in all directions and rotate easily. This is key to doing well at the competition and beating out tough competitors we may face.

“We’re on a pretty good pace with our main [competition] robot, and our choice this year to build the Kitbot has payed off really well in getting a head start on programming and testing, says Wes H, Chief Technical Officer

In this game, Hydra earns endgame points and a possible ranking point by climbing onto a high-hanging shallow cage, with additional points for a low-hanging deep cage.

“It was a lot of prototyping and we discovered many different ways we could approach this obstacle” said Sarah H, Climber Mechanism Build Lead

The intake has wheels that spin to make way for the algae, green playground balls used as game pieces, into the robot. The intake team struggled at first, having problems with the motors on the sides of the intake, but were eventually successful.

“We had to restart, but we have a second design and it’s going good,” said Hannah S, Algae Intake Build Lead.

Branding is important to our team, especially at competitions where every team will have custom pins available. Our bright red, orange, and yellow tie-dye design is representative of our team and has become a part of the LigerBots brand. We give out many of our team buttons outreach events, but we give out hundreds at competitions where members of other teams collect them.

While the mechanical team was building the robot, the graphics team was hard at work making designs for this year’s competition pit banner, merchandise, and team flyers. While the Graphics team remains in their separate space, there is still lots of collaboration with other team members for projects such as the booklet.

“Graphics isn’t just about designing stuff, it’s also about the contents as well,” says Yushi T, VP of Graphics.

This was a successful and exciting build season, and we can’t wait to see Hydra’s performance at competitions and hopefully win some awards! Stay tuned for our first competition, Week 0 (a pre-season event), on Saturday, February 15 at Merrimack, New Hampshire!