Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Here’s the latest article on the Warlocks Robotics team’s success at Atlanta:

Lockport Union-Sun & Journal Online – SCHOOLS: LHS robotics team finishes 3rd in world championships.

As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Knoxville TN. We’re driving to Atlanta for the National FIRST Robotics competition. It’s a long drive and a long weekend once we get into the competition, so I insisted on taking it easy on the drive down. Continue Reading…

Spent the day following some of the FIRST Regional competitions online again. The Toronto Regional was fun to watch because I know so many of the teams. But in typical internet fashion, after the lunch break, the feed went to crap.

It started out with a good feed, the video was clear as can be expected, but you could tell it was a token effort by Discovery.ca. One camera angle that never changed and the audio went on and off like they just cranked up a noise gate. Nothing kills the excitement of a robotics match like silence whenever the announcer isn’t talking.

(I read a posting on Chief Delphi, an unofficial FIRST robotics forum, that the TV crews had been cut back drastically due to economic cutbacks. They were probably lucky to get them there at all. Many of the regional video coverage isn’t done professionally at all, just put up on ustream or Stickam.)

But once they got into the final rounds, the connection got really spotty. The video was so bad you couldn’t see anything in the score area and the robots were blurry. That is when you got it at all. I switched to the Palmetto Regional for a while just because it was watchable. They were being fed out of Clemson Univ. and the quality was better. They had the same woman announcer as we had at Philadelphia. Continue Reading…

We’re tired. It’s pouring rain, and it’s a long walk to the parking lot from the building we just left, but we couldn’t be happier.

Eleven hours earlier, we had arrived, a bit late, but still in time to hear the National Anthems for the United States and Canada sung at opening ceremonies. It was the third and last day of the FIRST Robotics Fingerlakes Regional Robotics Competition at RIT in Rochester NY.

I had ridden there the previous two days in a school bus, getting up at 6:00 am to meet it. We left one night about 7:30 pm and felt good to get out early on Friday by 5… The extra hour or so of sleep on Saturday felt good, but it wasn’t enough.

It’s hard keeping up with these kids. I’m 55 and my mind says it wants to do the things they do, but my body is always vetoing that idea. My feet are sore, my back aches and my joints complain whenever I work in an awkward position. But I wouldn’t miss it. These kids keep me feeling a little younger than I might if I just stayed home and vegetated. Continue Reading…