For the past couple of weeks, we have been working on redesigning our website and we are quite happy with the result. We hope that you find this site to be useful in terms of resources and information as well as enjoyable to use. We tried to capture the winter and holiday spirit by making a minor change to our logo and website.

As of last year, we posted daily to our blog during the build season. We plan to follow this tradition as we feel it provides valuable information to the community and also allows our team to reflect on the progress we make each day.

We are always looking to improve our website and greatly value your input. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please contact us by clicking here. Please choose “Website feedback” for the category. We also want to you to stay connected with us, which is why we have incorporated several social media icons into our website including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We update these regularly, so be sure to follow us to get the most recent information about our team!

Cheers and happy holidays,

Team 114

The lathe we bought to replace our aging and well-worn Craftsman has arrived. The truck showed up last Tuesday with no warning, requiring some quick cleanup of our shop to get ready for the new machine. The new lathe is a Grizzly G4003G. We bought the gunsmith version because it comes with tools that are useful for longer parts, such as a steady rest and a follow rest.

Although it was a bear of a job bringing the half ton machine into the shop, the Grizzly is now at home, and after some wiring and TLC, will be up and running in time for the new season.

For a hands-on building project, the students have been working on building mini kit-bots. These are similar to the kit bot that teams receive in the Kit Of Parts at the start of every season, but for this project we have restricted the dimensions to a max of 18″ x 18″.

For the past four weeks, we have been in “rotation groups”. Six to seven students have been participating in a week of instruction on 4 different topics. The groups include CAD, Electronics, Machining, and Mechanical. At the end of the mechanical rotation, each group was tasked with building a Lego NXT robot to compete in a Tug-o-War tournament. This required that they think about and implement the ideas of traction and gear ratios.

This last weekend we participated in the Cal Games competition hosted at Woodside High School. Cal Games is an annual competition run by WRRF, the Western Regional Robotics Forum. The competition was a rerun of the 2012 game, Rebound Rumble.

We did fairly well at the competition. We had no major mechanical or electrical issues during the qualification matches. After qualification we ended up seeded 10th. We were selected to be on Alliance #6, with Homestead Robotics (Team 670) and MVRT (Team 115). We ended up being eliminated in the quarterfinal matches.

Overall it was a good competition. We had a large turnout from many of our new team members on both Friday and Saturday. It was a good introduction of what competitions are like to those who had never been to one and everybody had lots of fun.

We are looking forward to next year and this upcoming build season!

To see the matches and rankings, please click here.

To see pictures of our team at CalGames, please click here.