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FTC Team
2010: Hotshot!
Stuyvesant FTC teams Fusion and Fission participated in Hot Shot! , played on a twelve foot square field, where each corner of the field housed an elevated tube filled with fifteen wiffle balls. A lever released the wiffle balls, making them roll down a ramp and scatter across the field. Two alliances, each composed of two teams, sought to transport balls to one of three locations: a square mat in the center of the field, an elevated rotating birdhouse-structure in the center of the field, or a rectangular container three feet away from the field. Balls on the mat scored one point each, balls in a bird house scored five points each, and balls in the outer containers scored ten points each. Balls could only be scored into the outer containers in the last thirty seconds of a match, called the End Game. A yellow bonus wiffle ball could be deployed at this time and doubled the points of all balls in a location on the field if scored.
Both teams immediately decided that the optimal strategy was to gather as many wiffle balls as possible before the End Game and unload them all at once, while occasionally spinning the birdhouses to throw off teams seeking to score in them. After weighing their options, they chose to use a flywheel to propel balls into the goal over a catapult mechanism, which would be difficult to implement within the required dimensions. For the next two months, both teams slaved over countless gear configurations until one successful dual flywheel mechanism was constructed. The teams then split to develop two unique acquiring mechanisms.
Fusion opted for a design which used wheels to propel wiffle balls upward through two chambers in the robot onto a platform for storage, while Fission pursued a design with a conveyor belt running two belts made of rubber bands that carried balls into a hopper. Both teams progressed with their intended designs. At the end of December, both teams decided to completely redesign the design. Fusion would now build a spinning acquirer with bristles to whisk in balls onto an elevator system that would rise up once at the end of the match to get balls into the flywheels. Fission decided on a conveyor with a friction pad belt that would convey balls into a hopper to be gravity fed into the flywheels. Both teams’ building processes now coincided with FRC build season for the final stretch.
At the New York City FTC regional, both teams encountered great difficulties from the start, mostly on the programming side. After dealing with elevator issues, they got through to the finals for its division. Fusion fought to the end, but came up short by a few points and did not move on to the event finals. Despite this, the team’s well-executed design, well documented building process, and extensive outreach impressed the judges. As a result, Fission was given the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award. Both teams overcame major setbacks to win Stuypulse’s first FTC awards. Stuyvesant Fission and Fusion are eager to come back to competition this year even stronger, with many more awards to be won.
How We Got Started
In the spring of 2006, our FTC, then known as the VEX team, was co-founded by members of FRC Team 694 Nathan Keyes and Nathan Bixler with the idea of getting more of our school involved with FIRST. Since then, the team has worked closely with the FRC team, sharing their lab.
Region 4 Robotics Competition
Since the team was started at the end of the 2006 FIRST VEX Competition season, our first competition and highlight of the year was a VEX competition hosted by Stephen Schapinsky of Region 4 Robotics in Queens.
2006: FVC
Although the FIRST VEX Competition challenge is released in September, our team got off to a late start in 2006 , registering and assembling the team only three weeks before our regional. Our small team worked hard to produce a robot that would compete in our first FVC competition. The event was quite successful as we won two out of four of our matches.
There were many more interested students this year, warranting the entry of two teams. Many of 2006's members had since moved on to become full fledged members of Team 694. However, in 2007, the two teams were led by veterans Jordan Perr and Susan Zheng. Taking a lesson from last year, the teams started designing early on in September and met weekly to work on the bots. At competition, the robots performed admirably and both ended up on the same alliance and became quarter-finalists at the NYC Regional. Read more about that year's competition on the 2007 Season page.
VISC
During the offseason, our efforts were directed toward involving even more Stuyvesant H.S. students in this fun and rewarding program. As a result, VISC (Vex Inter-Stuy Competition) was created. This program was meant as a general introduction to FIRST for students who may not yet want the commitments involved with a full-fledged FIRST team. Instead, VISC was significantly less time consuming and has since recruited several more members to the Vex team. The competition operates by pitting teams of members against each other in unique challenges.
2009: FTC
For the 2008 season, FIRST changed the FVC program to the FTC program and changed from the VEX platform to the TETRIX platform and gave teams the option to use NXT-G, LabVIEW, or RobotC to program their robots to make the challenge more accessible to teams with a wide range of experience levels. The challenge was called FaceOff. The object of the game was to acquire hockey pucks of your teams color from troughs on four sides of a square field and dump them into a cyclindrical or triangular container in the center of the field. The teams were led by President Robert Juchnicki and Vice-President Yimeng Xu. One team opted for a design that implemented a lever with a cup at the end resembling the troughs. The other one attempted a daring design with a container that rolled along knotches on a ramp, functioning similarly to a fire truck's extending ladder. We attended the FTC New York City Regional held at the Jacob Javitz Center, where the team with the lever robot got up to the semifinal rounds, where after a close and heated match they were eliminated.