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The 2008 Season
The path to success is often a hard one. Luckily for Stuy 694, who celebrated its eighth birthday in 2008, it also happened to be a well traveled one. Like years in the past we once again were faced many challenges; but persistence paid off, and Stuypulse ultimately produced one of our finest robots to date, DESbot (named by sponsor, D.E. Shaw and Co). Sadly the season also saw the final year of Stuyvesant’s second generation of engineers (2005-2008), and though we were sad to see them go, we are sure that their presence was what inspired our whole team to go into overdrive and shatter expectations in New Jersey, New York and at nationals in Atlanta.
A build season design session
Designing the robot played a major role in our execution of the task. Though we were presented with many innovative and original ideas, we ultimately decided on the lucrative eight-point hurdle as our scoring target. Never a team to overlook the past, we developed much of our robot based on the designs of our '04 robot Larry, incorporating a larger grabber combined with a pneumatic “puncher” to launch the ball over the hurdle. Over the next six weeks the team worked tirelessly to produce a robot true to our original designs. Nevertheless changes were made; week two saw the replacement of the Ackerman drive with the standard four wheel drive, and week three saw a major overhaul of the grabber with the introduction of “tusks”. However, only five weeks after Kickoff, the team had turned what was once just wheels, axles, plates, and electronics into a fully functional robot that was completed early enough for practice and at correct competition weight.
DESbot hurdling at NYC Regional
Stuypulse took its positions and prepared for what would become a very long competition season. In Trenton we found ourselves pitted against 63 other robots – and despite fuse blowouts and drive train malfunctions, the team managed to win 6 out of 8 preliminary matches making it farther than ever before - ending up in the top 8 teams and a semifinalist. Our greatest success however would come, not from Trenton, but instead New York where the teams efforts to spread awareness of technology and general engineering excellence resulted in winning the coveted Engineering inspiration award. The Engineering Inspiration award allowed our team to advance to the national competition in Atlanta where our team fared very well. Our own successes coupled with the successes of our VEX team made for what we believe to be a very productive and memorable competition season.
A scene from our FLL Tournament
In addition to our engineering achievements, we were also the subject of a six-part documentary produced by the Wall Street Journal (found here) and participated in numerous demonstrations that were held at places like Credit Suisse, the World Science Fair, and the Tribeca Film Festival. We also published a robotics cookbook complete with recipes provided by our many mentors and parents and ran our first official FLL Qualifier event in partnership with Pace University.
| 2008 Game
Read more about this year's game, Overdrive |