TEAM DUCT TAPE

All that hard work and the long hours paid off! Team Duct Tape earned the Inspire Award and captained the Winning Alliance, taking it to a four match, edge of your seat final alliance play.  It was touch and go at the beginning, starting with balky computers that fought Bluetooth and nail, and ended with our very grateful finish on a borrowed computer.  Some great on-the-fly engineering improvements, tenacious programming, courageous driving, and enthusiastic team support by all our dedicated members and supportive families took us all the way to the end.    We really enjoyed partnering with Force Applied and hope to have some practice time with them before the state event on Feb. 27.    We’ll post pictures soon!

Congratulations to all the great winning teams at Saturday’s event, and thanks to FTC team Minotaur for hosting such a fun event!

Winning Alliance
2845 (Alliance Captain) Team Duct Tape
3837 Force Applied

Finalist Alliance
3830 (Alliance Captain) SkyNet
499 Nano Fusion
Judged Awards
Inspire Award - 2845 Team Duct Tape
Rockwell Collins Innovate Award - 409 Dynasty
PTC Design Award - 499 Nano Fusion
Think Award - 3910 Freezer Burn
Connect Award - 3968 The Roller
Motivate Award - 3830 SkyNet

FTC Teams 409, 3830, 3837, 3846 (Host Team), and 3968 qualified for the Florida State Championship.

The train’s running a bit slow but we’re still on track for a good showing at this coming Saturday’s Middleton High School Last Shot Qualifying Competition.  More than a dozen teams will compete in this final qualifying event before the Feb. 27 State Championship .at the University of South Florida.

This is our last opportunity to put the robot to the test in a competitive environment, to evaluate the improvements team members made after their first competition in November’s RobotMania at Hillsborough High School.

In the intervening months, TDT members have collaborated with mentors , mentored FLL teams and volunteered at FLL events, done some community outreach, and welcomed a new member who’s plunged right in with the can-do team spirit that keeps Team Duct Tape going strong!

Now it’s just a matter of putting it all together, on Saturday, and showing just how much team members have learned and how much they truly enjoy working together.

Working on shooter

There was a good balance of work and play at this weekend’s meeting, thanks in large

Cheesecake Break!

part to a team member family’s donation of cheesecake to our snack collection. Fueled by the rich creamy dessert, team members made significant progress on finishing up their rebuild, but hit some snags again, which they hope to work out during a mid-week meeting.

One of the problems has been how to sufficiently agitate balls in the hopper to keep them from jamming en route to the shooter.  Team members have consulted with mentors and looked at various examples of mixers and agitators in evaluating what might work in their case.  They’ve considered everything from static mixer designs to paint mixer concepts, looked at how

Keeping an Eye on Things

balls move in things like  tennis ball shooters, and mocked up prototypes in cardboard and aluminum.

Evaluating Sketch-Up Models

A team member employing Google Sketch-up was able to model,  fairly accurately,  the behavior of balls  moving through hoppers of various configurations and using different types of agitators, to help team members better visualize the physics at play.

Between puzzling over design problems and cheesecake breaks, team members also finished work on their new banner,  a breath-taking work of duct tape art!  Hopefully our mid-week meeting will bring some equally dazzling resolution on the robot build.

Rip it! Stick it! Done ...with the Banner

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… A bill will soon be introduced into Congress - the Engineering Education for the Innovation Economy Act, or [...]

Our 3rd Law of Robotics: Every correction requires an equal and opposite re-correction!
At least that’s what it seems like sometimes. Nearing the home stretch on robot improvements, team members found some of their improvements necessitate other changes, which they hope to complete on Monday, when they utilize a school holiday for more build time.
When [...]

On January 9, teams competed at the Science Center of Pinellas’ Bot Challenge FTC Qualifying competition. Congratulations to teams Minotaur and Smoke and Mirrors for their Winning Alliance Award, scoring, in the third match, an impressive 485 points!  The rest of the results are as follows:

Winning Alliance

1369 (Alliance Captain) Minotaur
2868 Smoke and Mirrors

Finalist Alliance

506 [...]

We just learned of a tragic bus accident involving FRC students with rookie team # 3125, on their way to a kick off event.  One student died and 17 others were injured.  We’re so very sorry and extend our deepest condolences to families and team members.
-FTC Team Duct Tape

We made a lot of progress on our robot redesign at our last meeting.  Everyone’s
Wiring and Fitting
contributed something to the robot,which is coming together nicely.  We also welcomed a new team member — yet another Chris!  Chris 3.0 brings a background in Vex robotics to Team Duct Tape and an easy warmth and friendliness [...]