Category: Uncategorized

From March 9th to March 12th, the team drove up to Madera South High School to attend the Central Valley Regional. The team placed 20th out of 47 in qualification matches and was the 1st pick in the 8th seat alliance! There was a tough battle during quarter finals, as two tiebreaker matches were played before the team advanced to semifinals. The team won semifinals and then advanced to finals, which the team ended up placing 2nd. During the award ceremony, the team was given the Wildcard award, which gives a spot for the World Championships!

The next regional the team will be attending is at UCI for the Orange County Regional, from March 29th to April 1st!

World Championships will be held at the George R. Brown Convention Center, Toyota Center, and Minute Maid Park in Houston, Texas during Spring Break! (April 19th to 22th)

Stay tuned for the exact convention center the team will be attending!

The team brought all focus to prototyping the robot. The shooter and intake system were developed, giving promise for the first stage of the robot. The prototype drive system is currently being developed, and the team hopes to get a prototype chassis by the upcoming Saturday. The programming team is writing up code for the robot and some field elements were built, ready for testing.

On the day of the kickoff, our team woke up early for the FIRST robotics live stream. This live stream would include the game reveal, which presents the objective of the game and the point system. This game definitely led to the team to come up with strategies that focus on different aspects of the game; the team realized that this game really puts the “teamwork” in “STEAMworks”. The second challenge for the team was designing a robot to complete the different objectives in the most efficient way.  At the end of the day, the team went home and the officers even continued discussions!

In the past few training sessions for wiring and media, we have learned about the basics. For media, we have learned how to access the website and edit blog entries, post pictures, and change or update old information. In the wiring sessions, we learned how to solder wires, or connect them by heating the solder onto the wires and letting them harden. We also have a mock kickoff on December 15th, which is taking an old game and developing prototypes of the game with different groups of people.

With only a few days left in build season, the robot is in its final stages of development. CTO Michael Justin told us, “After 5 weeks of prototyping and development, we finally settled on a final design. All of our hard work is finally coming together.” 

This build season is progressing rapidly, with multiple prototypes being developed. Although we can’t give out too many details yet, this year’s robot is going to be one of our most successful yet.

2016 is the year of Stronghold for the FIRST Robotics Competition! From taking down enemy castles to damaging defenses, this year holds great promise for our team to show our engineering creativity. We are getting a running start this year and beginning trade studies today, and we expect to be prototyping within a week. Whether a student is fabricating parts, building a model of the robot on CAD, or developing code, these next 6 weeks promise many opportunities to learn through both success and setbacks. Good luck team 4276!

At tonight’s training session, members of the team learned about the website, as well as how to disassemble our previous year’s robot, Geir. Freshman Liaison, Avery Levin, was quoted saying, “We are giving Geir new life”.  Students learned how the robot comes together and gained experience using tools. This was not only a helpful learning experience, but also had the practical benefits to recycle the parts to build a test robot.

Today Viking Robotics hosted the second annual OCRA Training day and the first ever totebot race. Congratulations to the Friarbots (Team 3309) on their victory in the race, and thank you to all the teams who attended!

After a relaxed summer we’re back in full swing training mode. Trainings are every Tuesday at 4:30, and make sure to keep checking your email for updates! Coming soon we will begin adding photos of the training sessions, so make sure to check the gallery tab! Also, big thanks to all the officers for putting together presentations to kick off the first ever fully student run training!   

https://youtu.be/RR0OJNsstSc

Today we mounted motors to the robot chassis for our totebot. Furthermore, we helped Momentum Robotics with public relations and setting up social media. Follow them on intstagram @momentumrobotics and on Facebook, with Twitter coming soon. Also, if you are feeling generous and want a way to support local students and get access to a large advertising platform for your business, head on over to our sponsorship page or contact us!

Attention all members looking to get more involved in the team: we still have two positions open! If you are interested in either of these, please contact CEO Jordan Murray at jmurray1080@gmail.com.

Business Director
– Generate business plan
– Generate flyers and other promotional media to promote the team
– Awards submissions

Community Outreach Director
– Organizes external activities such as demos, school visitations, community presentations
– Establishes relationships with new sponsors and promotes team
– OCRA Representative

Just because it’s summer doesn’t mean we aren’t active! From bonfire’s to meetings, robotics knows no vacation. Make sure that you have been added to the email or texting list so you don’t miss out on summer training and activities. You can sign up for reminders from Remind here.

This previous weekend Viking Robotics made an appearance at the Ventura Regional. We finished qualifications in 35th place out of 41 teams, and unfortunately were not invited to join any alliances for quarterfinals. In the previous regional we experienced problems with obtaining totes from the chute, so we built two separate ramps in hopes of resolving this issue. One of the ramps was constructed of aluminum and tied to our robot with a rope; while the other boasted two “butterfly wings” that were directly attached to the ‘bot, and utilized motors to guide the totes in a perfect position for stacking. After testing both modules in several of the matches, we decided to discard both and rely on keeping a tote at the bottom of the stack to help with alignment. We also added another component to the side of our robot that could lift recycling bins. This addition greatly helped with autonomous mode and allowed the drivers to cap off our stacks.

Although our performance at this regional was not the greatest, Viking Robotics is proud of our overall season and how much we have improved. From our original designs to the final product, our robot has stayed true to its initial purpose. We cherish and applaud the members who have worked towards their potential and surpassed expectations to try and accomplish this ambitious design. The knowledge gained by undergoing rigorous training and working long, exhausting hours to contribute to the robot is invaluable and will stay with our teammates as they pursue other aspects of life. As mentioned in the follow-up meeting held on Wednesday, there were many positive aspects of this season and many improvements for next year.

Teammates: Please, if you haven’t already, fill out the form provided by Mr. Zook through email and on the Facebook page. Feel free to express ideas for areas of improvement, as well as things you enjoyed about this past season. Good job this season! Hope to see you all at the follow up meetings. :)

Parents and Mentors: THANK YOU!!! Each and every student appreciates your flexibility and constant support; without you, we wouldn’t function as a team. Thank you for allowing us to stay at school extra late, and for sacrificing your free time (and oftentimes sleep) to help us pursue our passion. We love you!!!

Left Shark: We love you as well. Never forget that.

Congratulations and good job to each team that competed at the LA Regional! It was great seeing the diversity of robots and having a chance to interact with other members from different teams.  During the regional we experienced some difficulties at the beginning of qualifications, but quickly worked to resolve them and managed to earn a ranking of 11th place out of 66. This is a new record! Seeing our robot perform was exciting as well as invigorating. It felt truly amazing to see our hard work come to life on the field. Moving onto quarterfinals, Viking Robotics was invited by teams 3328, NohoRobo, and 3309, Friarbots, to compete in their alliance. Although we did not have a chance to move onto semifinals, we are proud of everyone’s performance and grateful for the opportunity to work alongside them. This past weekend has helped us understand improvements that could be made to our robot and different ways in which we can approach situations that occur during matches. We would like to thank the parents who donated lunch for everybody and made us all a little happier. Another thanks to everyone who gave teammates a ride to the competition. Without your flexibility and generosity we wouldn’t have had such a great experience. Hope to see everyone at the Ventura Regional!

With the Los Angeles regional coming up, the team has been spending these last days preparing for competition and rehearsing driving through our practice bot. Not only have we been speaking of strategy, but we are constantly looking for ways to improve. Our practice bot has been essential to our refinement and has greatly helped the drivers better understand and get a feel for the drive system. The anticipation of seeing our hard work finally pay off is one of the main components keeping us excited for the regional (besides seeing all of cool robots of course). Good luck to all the teams competing and happy stacking!

For today’s blog post, I would like to focus our attention on our highly capable CAD team that has now successfully assembled a complete robot design on CAD. With this design complete, it will be much easier for our build team to cut, drill, and assemble parts on the robot. Thanks CAD team!

On this build day, we CADed up the chassis and the lift mechanism for the robot. Some of the builders made a prototype of the lift mechanism so we can test our design in the field elements. Mr. Zook brought in our new 3D printer, this will allow us to print our own gears and trinkets to give to fellow Alliance members.

Recently, our determined team has overcome challenges like building the chassis and the collector mechanism, as well as some stupendous CAD work. Keep up with the magnificent work during this build season, and make sure to check out the calender and student pages under the resources tab!

Build season is in full swing, and team 4276 is on track to have a top tier robot built by bag day. Our system for lifting totes is in the fine tuning stage, and the robot is finally starting to come together as a whole. The next few weeks are sure to pose many challenges to our initial design, however there is no setback our amazing build team can’t come up to a creative and innovative solution to.

Today was the fifth build session of the season, and our team is working very hard towards the common goal. Programmers learned how to use the new roboRio robotics controller, and some of the build team members put together four new mini gearboxes and soldered wiring for encoders. Others continued working on the prototype tote collector, and they experimented with different wheels and contact points to see which one does the job the best. We are now exactly one month away from the Los Angeles Scrimmage, and so it is very important for the team to stay focused in order to finish the robot before then.

Today marked our third build session of the season and progress is definitely being made. Many continued to prototype their designs while keeping in mind game strategy and the new rules.  The programmers got to see their codes for the encoder, one of the motors, and joystick in action and were very excited. Be sure to check out our new Student Resources page for a convenient spot to connect to important webpages.