DarthImpala

‘08 TE Sessions
Fall ‘08 was challenging  for our Technology Enrichment Sessions. Due to FIRST changing the control system we had to add totally new material, compress our normal topics with out loosing too much, and do it around a new kit (Lego NXT). I was in responsible for the presentation and development of the mechanical content.

‘08 RoboCup
For the 2008 competition year I designed the fleets drive train and worked on integrating the systems in to our small footprint. For 2008 the game was held in Suzhou, China. We were able to compete and scored our first goal against a real opponent.

FIRST
I have been involved with FIRST since 2003. FIRST is an international robotics competition which stands For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Teams are given six weeks to design and build a competition robot for that years game. Currently it is a 3v3 style competition, but before 2005 it was a 2v2 throwdown. From 2003 to 2005 I was a member of the CircuitRunners Robotics team from Wheeler High School. After I graduated from Wheeler I started mentoring my old robotics team through the RoboJackets FIRST team.

‘07 RoboCup
Our RoboCup team was formed in 2006 with the objective of making a showing at the 2007 RoboCup world event hosted at Georgia Tech. During the summer of 07 I worked to finalize bugs in the mechanical aspects our small size team. We made the competition deadline with basic capabilities. However, one of the two cameras that are needed to view the field failed.

Comprehensive Image Gallery
In the beginning of my freshman year at tech I decided to locate and organize as many images as possible from Robotics events both current and in the past. The Gallery powered by Gallery 1.x is now at over 4,000 images spanning five years of events which are all available in their highest possible resolution. After becoming PR chair in summer of 2007, I made a move to host a portion of my personal gallery in a more permanent fashion on the RoboJakets website. This gallery runs on gallery 2.2.x and has wealth of both images and video resources.

‘06 IGVC
In the summer of 06 I helped build the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition robot. This robot had to autonomously navigate a course and dodge obsticales. My part was in the mechanical fabrication of the robot. As anyone could imagine the programming challenge aspect, which meant making the robot drive by it self with the aid of a camera, took the group that worked on it more than a semester to complete.

Scouting Database
During my time in High School I was involved with the many different aspects of FIRST. One them was scouting teams at the competitions. To assit in this huge task I developed a completely web based scouting system using PHP and MySQL. The system tracked a teams progress, recorded stats on the robots, and provided general statics about the competition overall.