The team is ready to head to Fort Lauderdale for the South Florida Regional next weekend for another awesome week of competition! We’re excited to get back to work after an exciting performance at the Orlando Regional. It took a couple matches to get up and running, but by our 5th qualification match we were starting to become an offensive powerhouse. We reset the the regional high score without fouls three times during qualification and ended getting picked by team 108 The Sigmacats on the number one alliance. We picked up team 4707 Force as the 24th pick in alliance selections and went on to the games. Unfortunately due to some malfunctions with robots on our alliance we fell in the quarter finals to the 8th seed alliance. Congrats to the 8th seeded alliance, 79 Krunch, 744 Shark Attack, and 1772 The Brazilian Trailblazers, for winning the Orlando regional!

Next weekend we will be competing at the South Florida Regional. We are looking to make a few changes to increase our shooting percentage and maybe pick up some additional disks in autonomous! It should be an exciting weekend so make sure you keep up with us on Facebook and Twitter to follow all the excitement!

I often get asked, and even more frequently ask myself, why I spend sometimes upwards of 30 hours a week on robotics. I’m reminded why every time I go out to talk about FIRST, because each and every time, without fail, more and more people answer yes when I ask them if they’ve heard about FIRST Robotics. My dream is that my children will one day be able to look up and see their favorite FRC team winning a world championship on TV; and for it to be normal that they hope to one day be able to celebrate under the confetti on Einstein. We’re are getting closer and closer every day because of the thousands of people who work tirelessly to make that dream a reality, and I’m proud to be one of them.

Welcome to the 2013 FRC season and this years game, Ultimate Ascent! Yesterday we held a kickoff event with several teams from around central Florida and it was an amazing success, not only did everything go smoothly, but we got an amazing game to play for this season! The goal of the game is to retrieve frisbees  shoot them into goals, and then climb a pyramid that’s 10 feet tall! If you want to see more specifically what we have to do make sure to watch the game animation on our home page so you can see just what we’ve gotten ourselves into for the next 6 weeks of build season!

Speaking of build season, we’re excited to start work today in our new build space hosted by the amazing company 3D perception! They do amazing work with visual displays and visualization applications, make sure to check them out on our sponsors page. Today we are going to finalize our strategy and hopefully begin designing so that we can prototype in the coming days. It’s going to be an amazing season filled with “oinks”, “booms”, and most of all, “WATCH OUT FOR THE FRISBEE!!!”

Our final record at IRI was 1-8, and although we didn’t win many matches,  have never been more proud of a group of my friends in my entire life. Since I joined bacon last year I have been to 4 regionals and championships, we have faced a lot of challenges at each and every one, but I don’t think I have ever seen challenges as elusive and frustrating as many that we faced this weekend. Although we didn’t always know how we were going to make it through we never stopped making it. Without any mechanical electrical, or programming mentors (although with some little help from some IRI volunteers and other teams) we managed to solve almost everything that was thrown at us. Friday as the day went on it seemed like each match was something else that was going on, there were hands in the robot fixing things like a bee hive in spring every second, including at one point carrying the Ethernet cable into the arena while we were queuing to try and test right before a match. At one point everything had seemed to have come to a low, we were 1-4, we had no idea how to fix several problems we were having and spirits had begun to bottom out. Luckily, super Wendy came to the rescue and got everyone to work in minutes. Within hours we were almost back to full bacon goodness power and played one of the greatest games I have ever witnessed. Despite losing 53-52, energy had reached a record high. Between Kris and our alliance partners flawless driving, perfect execution of strategy, and a couple human player shots landed from John michael, we had managed to come within a point of taking down a highly favored alliance, including the esteemed 111 and rookie einstein team 4334. After an incredible final match we worked to get the robot up to par with what it is capable of. Throughout the day we had experienced issues with batteries, manipulator control board malfunctions, burnt out motors, jamming balls, and more. By the time we left the arena, we had successfully run the robot under the controls of just about everyone there and scored numerous baskets, didn’t jam a single ball, and never experienced voltage drops slowing down the robot. Wether or not we are dominating the competition, this has been beyond a doubt the most valuable event that I have ever gone too for robotics and I know that pretty much everyone here feels the same way. We have had to learn and apply more concepts and knowledge than I would have to say I personally have learned at every other event combined. Even though we didn’t win IRI on saturday, or even get into eliminations, we as people have won more than any cool basketball trophy.

Last year was the first year in our now seven FRC seasons that we did not qualify for championships, but this year 1902 is ready to bounce back onto the world stage. We are excited at the chance to test our robot “Porcus Magnus” against the rest of the world. We’re all prepared for installing a few replacements once we get there, but hopefully we can get through inspection on wednesday night, and be all ready for an incredibly epic amount of qualifying matches!

Today exploding bacon rides into the inaugural South Florida regional hoping to take it by storm and put on a show far above the level 1902 put on in Orlando. With several upgrades ready to be implemented as the day goes on, Porcus Magnus will change into a robot the likes of which it was never built to become, none the less, Bacon is ready to come in force over the next three days and give the world a preview for what’s in store at championships, next year, and beyond.

-Zach

It’s been less than a week since the Orlando regional wrapped up and the South Florida regional is already looming on the horizon. After passing inspection at 120.0 pounds (yes we like to cut it close) Bacon took home the imagery award as well as a nice semi finals finish. Beginning on thursday, we were busy every second of the competition. After unbagging we immediately got to work installing our 30 pounds of fabricated parts and getting the robot ready for competition. After a couple tries on the practice field we had our autonomous locked down. The Auto mode would go on to miss only three of the 28 auto shots throughout the competition, making it into the top three auto scorers at the event. Although we came home without a medal from Orlando, we are not deterred, as we head down to Boca next thursday, 1902 is ready to begin a tradition of Bacon domination at the brand new regional.

-Zach