Archive 2017 and Before

New blog post: Team 980 has registered for 2011 season! https://team980.com/team980-test/2010/09/30/team-980-has-registered-for-2011-season/

Team 980 has registered for it’s 10th season in the FIRST Robotics Competition program.

We’ve registered for the Los Angeles Regional, to be held at the Long Beach Sports Arena on March 24-26. This is our “home” regional event where we have won two of our three Regional Championships and twice were Regional Finalists. The Los Angeles Regional is held in an excellent location and will feature many of the top FRC teams from California.

Team 980 has also registered for the FIRST Championship in St. Louis (April 27-30). Since Team 980 did not participate in the Championship event last year, we are eligible to register early and did so! Team 980 is no stranger to FIRST Championship: we’ve participated in seven Championships in our history, with two appearances in division eliminations. Will we go to Einstein this year??

We plan to register for one additional regional event, most likely the San Diego Regional held March 10-12. This popular week #2 regional will teach us much about the new game and will feature a very competitive field: Teams 399, 599, 968, 973, 987, and 1538 have already registered.

We will learn about the new game at the Kickoff event, to be held Sat. Jan. 8. Between now and then, we have much work to do. We need to secure our build location, add new student recruits, obtain more sponsor support and add to our skill set in CAD, programming, web-site development, …

Welcome to the 10th season for Team 980 – let’s make it our best ever!

The 2010 SCRRF Fall Classic robotics competition will be held at John Burroughs High School on Saturday, Sept 25. Team 980 is the event host, coordinating the venue and volunteers for the competition. The competition is being played in the very modern, large, air-conditioned Main Gymnasium. The gymnasium accommodates sixteen pits as well as the playing field. The adjacent Multi-Purpose Room provides pit space for an additional dozen teams. As of Sept. 22, seventeen teams have registered for the event, with an additional pair of robots available to be shared by pre-rookie teams. The field includes Beach City Robotics (Team 294, 2010 World Champions), Beach Bots (Team 330, 2010 IRI Champions) and Eagle Robotics (Team 399, 2010 IRI Champions). The event allows teams to exhibit their robots to recruit new students, mentors and sponsors.

FallClassic_2010_PublicFlyer

The above flyer provides more information regarding the event. The competition is open to the public, with no admission charge.

Team 980 built a “stand-alone” t-shirt cannon designed to be easily mounted onto a robot chassis for demonstration and outreach events. Starting just after our return from IRI, an air-powered cannon was designed, built and tested in less than two weeks. Several Team 980 students, particularly Joey, Galina, Aaron, Alex, Alejandro, Bruno, and Laura worked with mentors David Toyne, Gerry O’Rourke, AJ Yeckel and David Brinza on the cannon at the Neighbors Empowering Youth (NEY) Lincoln Ave facility on Saturdays and a few weekday evenings.

Our t-shirt cannon was mounted to Team 2404?s Breakaway robot and was a big hit at the Los Angeles Sparks “City of Pasadena Night” event on August 4 at Staples Center. The crowd was awestruck by the height of the t-shirts fired from the cannon. The event was an exciting and successful demonstration of the NEY robotics program.

Erik Dreyer (Pasadena Education Foundation, Robotics Program Coordinator) posted a video of the t-shirt cannon firing four shirts into the Staples Center crowd in less than a minute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8miC6lSntuw

Team 980 competed in it’s seventh IRI event on July 16-17. We faced very stiff competition from the field of 78 top-notch FIRST Robotics Competition team. Except for a radio failure in our first match, our robot and drive team performed quite well in our matches. In the end, we were among 45 other teams that did not compete in the elimination round.

Another California team, the BeachBots (Team 330), finished as top-seed in the competition. After a four-hour marathon elimination round, the BeachBots went on to win IRI with a very strong alliance, including Teams 469 (Michigan), 359 (Hawaii) and 399 (Lancaster, CA).

Team 980 member Laura Toyne received a standing ovation for her original song performance at the IRI Talent Show on Friday night. Our trip to IRI was again an exciting and rewarding adventure!

Right after Team 980 returned from IRI, we started work on a t-shirt cannon to be used a robot demonstrations and promotional events. Our cannon will be featured at the Los Angeles Sparks “City of Pasadena Night” event at Staples Center on August 4!