Edina Robotics FIRST Team 1816 capped an amazing weekend at the 2012 North Star Regional by winning the Regional Chairman’s Award, FIRST’s highest honor, and earning a ticket to the Championships in St. Louis! Not only that but our 2012 Robot, Zephyr, proved to be a formidable competitor as well.
Our first task at the regional was to give Zephyr a rapid tire change, taking off her front treads and replacing them with non-driven, smaller wheels. We were trying to improve her flexibility and speed. With the new wheels, she got a lot better than she was originally at the Lake Superior Regional in early March. But – it made it more of a challenge to drive Zephyr up onto the balancing platforms in the middle of the field. We did our best but ended the qualification rounds with not enough points to make it into the Top 8 and the chance to build our own alliance for the elimination rounds. Instead, we were picked by the top-seeded alliance headed by Team 3293-Otters and were joined by Team 2883-F.R.E.D. Our alliance won our quarter-finals and semi-finals, only to find ourselves facing the second-seed alliance. That alliance was led by last year’s world champions, Team 111-WildStang, and their partners Team 2512-Daredevils and Team 4226-Huskies. Alas, our alliance could not quite out-maneuver the WildStang alliance and we ended our robot competition as North Star Regional Finalists.
There were 13 rookie teams out of the 63 competing at the North Star Regional. The Green Machine helped many with programming, robot building, and bumpers, including Teams 4244 – Raiders and 4166 – Robostang. While our robot pit crew was busy with the robot, our pit presentation crew also was ready to talk to everyone who walked by about our team, our outreach, and our business plan. We also won the Best Website award and the Entrepreneurship Award (for team structure and business planning) sponsored by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Team members also staffed the safety glasses stations for Thursday and Friday of the event. Team 1816 would like to thank all of the volunteers at this double-regional, which included many of our team parents and team alumni: Nat Thompson ’07; David Cook, ’08, Alistair McIntyre, ’09, Andrew Peter, ’10, Matt Hornung, ’10, Evan Shimizu, ’10, Kirsten McIntyre, ’11, Clara Lee, ’11. Thank you to our team alumni who worked as robot inspectors at the Lake Superior Regional (Dan Purdy, ’10 and Emily Benson, ’11) and we extend an even bigger thank you to our team alumni Kristofer Lindqvist ’07 and Lauren Lacy, ’07, now engineers at Procter & Gamble Co., who are helping establish the new Queen City Regional in Cincinnati!