By Anand Sharing and Teaching Kids at Outreach at FLL qualifier  “ Sharkfest ” 11/17  Prior to our Open House on 11/28 we took time out to attend and showcase our robot and our team at the Nov 17th FLL qualifier at Baker Middle School along with the Troy High Hammerheads at "Sharkfest".    We didn't know what to expect and we were so excited to see so much going on at the event, the FLL teams were competing and in between, they were coming into the cafeteria to explore a bunch of STEM activities that the Hammerheads prepared.   We also had a blast participating in some of the activities at the tables.  And, the FRC team was on the stage showing a super cool robot that threw a big bouncy ball that we got to catch and throwback.  It helped us see what the next step in First will be, FRC.   We had an FTC field set up by the Troy team that helped us show everyone all about "Smitty" and we fixed our wheels that day too - and...

By Anand Our goal for our Open House when we did our brainstorm and organized our Agenda for the night was for us to share what our team has learned over the past 8 weeks of doing FTC with others who might be interested in learning about Robotics.   We wanted to show them our Robot and give kids a chance to work our controllers and make him move.   We wanted to teach them about the different unique parts of our Robot, like our arm, our sweeper, and our basket design.   We wanted to also show them a little bit about block programming and give them hands-on experience with doing a simple program that they could modify.  We also taught the attendees about the differences between what an Autonomous vs. Teleop and how our team learned to successfully program "Smitty" to achieve our Rover Ruckus game goals.  We will be looking for at least 2 new team members to join our team and wanted to inspire other kids to join FTC community or school teams once they see...

By Jons The Rev Hub is very important in FTC robotics. It is important because it controls the robots motors, servos, and so much more.   It's basically like the "brains" of our Robot "Smitty".   As a team we didn't know what this was when we started.  But now after 10 weeks working on our FTC challenge preparation, we know what the ports are, where to plug in Servos vs. Motors and how critical it is to be careful with our Rev Hub.   We broke it by accident the first week of building and connecting it which was really stressful because one of our ports got broken and slipped inside the plastic box.  One of our dad's who is in engineer helped by opening it up and resetting the part and then we knew not to pull things in and out too hard when making connections with our wires onto the Rev Hub.

by Anand At Sharkfest, hosted by Hammerheads FRC team of Troy, which is the annual FLL qualifier.  Our team had a chance to share our robot and show elementary and middle school students what FTC is and how our Robot "Smitty" works. I spoke to a group of students about electronic parts and why we use sensors and what the wires do on "Smitty".  They asked questions and it was fun to teach someone else about robotics.

Our FTC robotics team is  hosting a Fun Interactive  Demo & Open House for  interested students to  visit us and learn about  robots & programming. Curious about Robotics?  WHAT IS FIRST?  WHAT IS FLL?  WHAT IS FTC? Learn about FTC Robotics Live Demo of our FTC Team Robot Learn block programming concepts Join us: Wed 11/28.  Time:  6:30-8:00pm   Where: Smith Middle School   Our event is open to all area 3rd - 5th graders We also invite Middle School students to explore Robotics opportunities Location:  SMITH MIDDLE SCHOOL,  5835 Donaldson Drive,  Troy, MI 48085 Join us in the Cafeteria on Nov 28th @ 6:30pm Send us an email to let us know you plan to attend: smithtechnoknights@gmail.com  RSVP's are appreciated but not required.   We just want to know how many attendees and which schools you are coming from so we can plan enoug...

Roster/team/how we work together/how we divide our roles By Ayush and Parent Mentor, Kaushika  I am going to talk about our roster,team/how we work together,and how we divide our roles.  In our robotics team our roster is Kazim, Astha, Ayush, Bakir, Sohan, Anand, Jons, Jaspreet, Nitya, Norbert and Sangeun.  With the guidance of our Parent Mentor, Ms. Kaushika, our team made a website/blog  www.smithtechnoKnights.blogspot.com .  We are going to pass this website to other teams when we finish 8 grade.  As some of our team members, like me, are only in 6th grade still.  Our team name is Techno Knights.  Our team is from Smith Middle School, and our team number is 15256.  The way we work together is by helping our team with various tasks like programming, building, etc.  The way we divide our roles is we have a Teleop Subteam and an Autonomous Subteam.   In the beginning we all worked on a...

Today I will tell you about the difference between FLL (first lego league) and FTC (first tech challenge).  By Kazim                There are many differences between these 2 that I will list below.  First difference is FLL uses only lego parts and in FTC you can use whatever you want, (metal parts, cardboard,etc.). Also FLL is an elementary school and FTC is middle school.  In FTC you have to put in a lot of effort for things like outreach and raising money for your team.  In FLL the technology is not that advanced and you do not need a driver(s), you use a program.  On the other hand, in FTC you need 2 drivers, but you also need a program to make the robot move.  In FTC the robot is way bigger and more advanced and the missions and rules are harder and more complicated.  These are the differences between FLL and FTC.

By Parent Mentor, Kaushika We are learning how to drive these past two weeks.  But, we are driving our Robot, not a car. It's fun but actually harder than they thought it would be.   Getting our Robot to move the way they want depends not only on the program that our Tele-Op sub-team has built.  But, also learning how to move the controller in sync with one another so that the arm doesn't get in the way of our sweeper or making sure they don't get "stuck" on one of the craters or the minerals.    The team has spent hours working on this coordination skill and this weekend they narrowed it down to 4 team members that will be practicing further to prepare for qualifying competition on Dec 8th.  This weekend at our outreach event that we attended, Sharkfest, hosted by the Hammerheads, the team got the chance to show their driving skills and strategize how to improve their driving plan during the 2 min game and get more points in their challenge. ...

I'm the team leader for our Tele-Op subteam. Our team learned how to use the block programming tools at the first few team meetings so that we could make our controller work. The controller is like a standard game controller - just like controllers you use with game systems but when they are used with our robot it only does the functions we program it to do.   We first planned out what we needed the controller to do and then wrote programs to help make our Robot move the way we wanted.  We changed it many times to refine it and tested different commands.   See three examples of our latest robot controller program below.   By Sohan Y. 1.  This is an example of a sweeper program. It rotates the sweeper up and down. You use Y and A to move this. 2.  This is an example of an Arm program it moves the Arm up and down. It uses the D-pad to move. 3. This is an example of a program that moves the arm.  It uses the joystic...

SMITH TECHNO KNIGHTS  Welcome.  We are Smith Techno Knights FTC Team.   This is our "Rookie Year".  We hope you will enjoy following our FTC journey and all the interesting things we've learned so far in our first season. We just launched this blog on Friday 11/2, so we'll be adding lots of cool updates shortly.   We have 11 team members from 6th to 8th grade from Smith.  Two Coaches.  1 Parent Mentor, 3 High School FRC mentors and LOTS of parent volunteers that have been helping us get up to speed this season. Check back next week - week 6 for our team - to see photos and information on our challenges and successes in modifying our basic Robot.  See how we went from our various paper design ideas to a cardboard prototype, then some rough models secured with duct tape and then creating a sheet metal component.   You'll see how it came together and what our current Robot looks like as tomorrow we will begin testing some programs we'v...

Fun Fundraisers.  We decided to do a neighborhood bottle drive.  Our team raised over $200 in just two weeks.    Thank you to our mentor, Raaga, who shared the steps we could try based on her experience in her FTC team when she was in middle school.   I got the chance to talk directly to neighbors about what are team is doing.  I shared videos on a phone of some of our practice sessions and they were excited to see what our team was working on.  It felt great to get their support and to share with them our experiences with FTC at Smith Middle School.    It was even more fun going to the grocery store and putting each of those cans, bottles and more into those cool recylcing bins.  Cha Ching!  By: Anand 

“Smitty's" design evolution What we learned by building our arm, sweeper and “crate”           When we first started building our robot, we followed the instructions that were provided online to build the robot.  When we started using the robot we were finding some problems with the arm and sweeper.  So the way we solved this problem was we discussed as a team how to figure out what was the best way to solve this solution.            The kind of problems we had was that when we were using the sweeper we had zip ties on the sweeper so it was really hard to get the minerals in the arm.  So the way we solved this problem was that we tested different materials to act as our “sweeper” until we found the perfect match.          Another problem we had while using the robot is that we could carry at the most 2 blocks o...

Hello -- I'm Smitty.  The Techno Knight Robot. My name is a play on the name of the school I represent, Smith Middle School. I was created from a box of strange looking metal parts that made no sense when I first arrived for my team of 11 Smith Knights.  It took my young knights and older mentors over 18 hours to build me from the ground up with some hiccups along the way.  One being that they tightened a screw so tight that it took lots of tools just to get me loose.  Took over 2 hrs just to pull me apart so my kids could try changing my chassis which was too wide and too long when we tried to fit me in a competition -sized box. That was painful.  Then they built an arm that kept getting stuck and I had to have surgery with some of my nice long arm cut off and gears changed.  I've gone through lots of changes over the past 8 weeks.  We've only got 3 more weeks till I need to show off my talents at our local qaulifier.  Recen...