Obama announces Educate to Innovate

Obama hosted an event at the White House today and had a number of great figures from science in attendance.  A FIRST Team from Virginia showed up and shared with the crowd last year's robot. 

Check out the video! Or Bad Astronomy's take on it.

iPhone automated vehicles

This is awesome! The video shows how early contestants to the DARPA challenge went about interfacing computers to cars. Check out the link to the German example and note that his car is drive-by-wire for steering. If I remember correctly my car (Honda Fit 2007) has a drive-by-wire throttle control. I doubt the steering or breaks are electronically driven. Not that I would use my car, haha.

http://gizmodo.com/5402152/surfing-the-road-on-an-iphone+controlled-oldsmobile

Bonus points if you can point out 2 flaws in the design. One is performance related, the other is safety related.

Obama: Increase Research and Development Funding

Yahoo! has a great article on a recent Obama speech and his intent to increase R&D funding in the US. These are exciting times to be considering engineering and science careers! Oh yeah, this also includes scholarships for college.

Read the article!

Tweenbot

Pretty neat write up on this bot and her social experiment here. Go bot go!

We're Not Going to the Championship

A most of you know, we've been on the "wait list" to attend the Championship in Atlanta. Unfortunately we received this email from FIRST:

Greetings Championship Wait List Teams:
We have heard from all of our teams that qualified last weekend, and due to the overwhelming number of acceptances we are writing to let you know we will not be able to offer your team a spot at 2009 Championship event. We thank you for your interest, and very much look forward to having your team back with us next year.

That's disappointing news, but we had an awesome season (in spite of our alliance members bad luck in the finals) and we hope you learned something about technology & teamwork.

And there are still a couple awards we might have a chance at: the 2009 Autodesk Inventor Award and Visualization Design Award. Autodesk should be posting the 5 finalists in each competition very soon: http://firstbasefrc.autodesk.com/?nd=competition

We plan to have a post-season "Celebration Night" at Bosch, for the students & their families, in late April or early May. I will send details in the next week or two.

(Note: I found the "Sad Robot" image here)

Austin Wins a Vex Kit

At the Palmetto Regional Competition Team 342's own Austin Bowen was the happy recipient of a VEX Robotics Design System. Mr. Scott tried to point out that the "team" really won the kit, but Austin wouldn't let go of the box. :)

Congratulations Austin!

Autodesk Awards

Some of you aren't familiar with the two Autodesk awards Team 342 is competing for:

Autodesk Inventor Award: Using the same software that professional engineers and designers use, students create a complete 3D model of their team's robot, including all parts, assemblies, drawings, photorealistic renderings and even animated videos showing the robot's function.

Autodesk Visualization Award: Students create a 30-second 3D animation about a topic specified in the award criteria. This year's topic is "Biomimicry". From Wikipedia: "A relatively new science that studies nature, its models, systems, processes and elements and then imitates or takes creative inspiration from them to solve human problems sustainably."

On or about April 3 Autodesk will announce the 5 finalists for both awards, and the winners will be announced at the Championship Event in Atlanta.

The Autodesk competitions are extremely tough but we have two strong entries. I will post the latest news as soon as we know something.