It’s been a winning week for the LigerBots!

Seventeen LigerBots trekked out bright and early last Saturday to Whitinsville, MA for the Bay State Brawl, our second off-season competition of the fall. This was another chance for our rookies to drive the robot, and they did great! We went into the playoffs in fifth place, and were the first pick of first-alliance captain team 3555, Aluminati. Our other partner was team 5494, Bizarbots. Our alliance ultimately won the competition!

These offseason competitions have been an opportunity for our new team members to get a taste of the competition environment: the field, the pit, the time pressure and the need for game strategy. The competitions also have provided first-hand experience with the FIRST values of “gracious professionalism” and “coopertition.” They allow our entire team to become better prepared for the rigorous build and competition season ahead.

In addition to the weekend competition, we’ve continued to run our newly-expanded preseason training. We have an especially busy training schedule this year since we have the largest rookie class in our team’s history. And, with this year’s addition of a strategy council, a graphic design team, student photographers and a writing staff, our training has become even more well-rounded, diverse and dynamic.

Our graphic design team has been working on flyers and signs that explain the principles behind STEM activities we often take to outreach events: brushbots, electrically conductive and insulating doughs, paper airplane construction and 3D printing. A number of our team members are learning to research, write, edit, create photographic illustrations, and graphically design an entire document themselves in Adobe Creative Suite.

Our new photography mentor and several students whose main interest at LigerBots is to document the team have kept us well supplied with pictures of our many activities. Please visit our Flickr page to see their work on display!

Our fundraising group continues to apply for grants from new sponsors and to contact our valued current sponsors for renewal, and we have started work on the maker fair we hold during the FLL Newton Qualifier every year. (This year, on November 17 at Newton North High School.)

The LigerBots have many technical training projects in full swing now. We have two fully-functioning FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robots, outfitted with two different drive trains (tank and x-drive) and programmed with student-written software. We might add an arm to one of them, and are almost ready to take the other one apart and let a new group of students build it again.

Our students are exploring different combinations of wheel size, number of motors and gear ratios to achieve either power or speed, so that we’ll be ready no matter what the 2019 game requires.

We also started researching and sketching turret designs that might be added to 2016 robot we use for outreach. A group of students is learning to sew by creating new bumper covers for the 2016 robot in team colors of orange and blue. Our electrical group continues to learn crimping and soldering and will likely rewire last year’s robot as a learning exercise.

We are also testing different ways to use our manual mill to manufacture metal parts with tight tolerances, and increasing our team members’ manufacturing skills.

In our H-Drive project our rookies are learning basics of chassis design, and in programing they are learning about the standard code library used by FRC teams. We recently ran three introductory courses in computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing (CAM). Now, students are continuing to learn them on their own from on-line tutorials so that they will be ready to CAD and CAM the robot quickly during build season.

And, more training sessions are planned during the coming weeks: elevator speech building and peanut butter and jelly robot. We hope to be more ready than we ever have been for the fast approaching build season!

This past weekend the LigerBots competed in the Beantown Blitz, an offseason competition run by FRC team 125, The Nutrons, at Revere High School.

Because this was a just-for-fun competition we allowed our rookies, mentors, and team members who have never driven the robot to get a feel for being on the drive team. They had a blast, and several proved to have untapped talent for driving the robot.

Part of the robot’s intake (one of the arms used to pick up and move game pieces) snapped during one of our matches, which gave the pit crew an opportunity to teach rookies how our repair pit works.

We were in fourth place after qualifying matches, and we were chosen during playoff alliance selection along with FRC team 2423 the KwarQs, by the second alliance captain, FRC team 1768, the RoboChiefs. We finished the day in second place, eventually losing to the alliance of FRC team 195 the CyberKnights, team 181 the Birds of Prey, and team 1965 the Firebirds. Five mentors and more than twenty students, ranging from rookies to competition-hardened veterans, came out for the day. Thanks to the Nutrons for hosting a great competition!

The LigerBots always run preseason technical training in robot fundamentals for new students and advanced technical training for our returning members. But, this year, we have greatly increased the number and scope of our projects so that our many new team members will be ready to help build a competitive robot when the new game is revealed in January.

Thanks to a concept conceived by a LigerBots veteran we have two teams of rookies getting immediate hands-on experience by constructing two FTC robots. These are the 18″ robots that compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge program later in the fall. Although we will not be competing with our FTC robots, seminars given by team mentors in drive mechanisms, gear boxes, elevators, arm manipulators, programming, and the integration of the various mechanical systems will allow students to make informed engineering choices that will allow these mini-robots to be fully functional in about six weeks. Then we’ll take the robots apart and give another group of ten to twelve students the opportunity to learn and build.

Our CTO, whose leadership of the electrical sub-team was instrumental to the team’s success last year, has organized a fall training program in electrical engineering. Team members are learning fundamentals of electrical and pneumatic components, and about the FIRST rules for required electrical components.

We also are offering hands-on soldering and wire-crimping practice by having students create “brush-bots,” a component of a popular activity we do with younger students at our outreach events.

Last year we designed our robot’s gearbox for speed and maneuverability. This year we are running project in the design of a new gearbox with a different emphasis: more rotational force (torque), which would help us compete well if the 2019 robot game demands pushing either robots or heavy obstacles on the playing field. We will try to fit our motors over the robot wheels to save space inside the robot for other components, and will test whether we have to weaken our robot’s metal frame when we make the necessary frame changes. Rookies will learn how to cut out the metal plates for the gear box on our computer numerically controlled (CNC) mill and will assist with assembly and testing.

Since our robot must use software instructions to carry out its complex actions automatically, we need a strong LigerBots programming group. We are using Arduino micro controllers to help students learn how to use sensors to detect their environment and instruct actuators to affect that environment. Arduinos are especially suitable for this kind of teaching because they are simple and because there are lots of web tutorials in how to program them. We have two team veterans and a mentor, all with experience in Arduino programming, tutoring our rookies.

We have many more technical projects planned, including design of a swerve drive and an H drive, design of a ball-shooting turret to attach to the 2016 robot we use for outreach, assembly of a quadrocopter, basic training in computer aided design (CAD), practice in drilling and milling, and rewriting of the 2016 robot code in a different computer language (changing it from C++ to Java.)

We hope that our team members will be able to use all of the knowledge they gain over the next three months in these technical training sessions to build a game-winning 2019 robot!

The LigerBots did two major outreach efforts last weekend. We set up our outreach tent at Newtonville Village Day, an annual street fair for local businesses, including entertainers and musicians.  

We had a variety of activities for the public to enjoy, including painting with our brushbots, learning about circuits with salt- and sugar-based pastes, and driving both our 2016 and 2018 robots.  

Numerous kids tested the elevator on our 2018 robot with a large beach ball and even more drove our 2016 robot and used its catapult. At one point our 2016 robot even danced along to the jazz being played across the street!

The Supernovas, an FLL team being mentored by LigerBots, joined us in our booth and demonstrated their LEGO robot for the public.

Also last weekend, the LigerBots went to RoboExpo, hosted by FRC team 1058, the PVC Pirates, at the Pheasant Lane Mall in Nashua, NH. RoboExpo is a yearly outreach event that gives teams the opportunity to show off their robots on a half-field, with game elements from the previous season.

This year seven FIRST Robotics Competition teams attended the event (FRC 1058, 1073, 1519, 2342, 2877, 3467, 5813), along with one FIRST Tech Challenge team (FTC 3737) and a couple of FIRST LEGO League teams. We brought our 2018 robot, “Chronos,” and showed it off on the field to thousands of visitors.

The LigerBots had a great time showcasing our robot and spreading the message of FIRST to the visitors at the mall.  We thank FRC team 1058 for inviting us to this great event.

Last Monday the LigerBots hosted our annual open house for prospective team members. New students took part in various activities hosted by our returning members to give our rookies a small sample of the technical and business opportunities they will have on the team. Our executives presented a short overview of the team and the FIRST organization, and showed some competition videos.

Activities included three milling and wiring stations, LED programming, a LEGO tower contest, a paper airplane challenge, a display of 3D printing, button making, a photo scavenger hunt, a story board writing project, and an opportunity to drive our 2016 and 2018 robots.

Each completed activity earned a raffle ticket stamp, and we pulled tickets out of a bowl to give away prizes at the end of the evening. Then we celebrated the beginning of our 11th season with dessert. For more photos of our open house, visit our Flickr.

We have new team members interested in many of the activities the LigerBots has to offer, including engineering, programming, graphics, photography, marketing, fundraising, public speaking, writing and finance. We are set to have a great year!

Over the next few weeks, we will be expanding our strategy council and launching into our preseason activities, including intensive technical and marketing skills training.

Our strategy council has already begun recruiting new members.  In addition to scouting other teams at competition to assess their robots’ skills, the newly formed council will do game analysis as soon as the 2019 game is revealed. Approaches developed by this group will help inform our robot design choices and strategies during competition.

Our fall outreach blitz continues! Please join us at RoboExpo in Nashua NH on Sept. 22, and at Newtonville Village Day on the afternoon of Sept. 23.