End of Phase 1

From the MoonBots blog:

Thank you all for all your hard work. The judges will be looking at your work over the next few days in order to decide the final 20 teams that will be moving on to Phase II. We will make an annoucement on or before June 21st.

Stay tuned. We hope you had fun and thanks again.


Like many of the MoonBot Challenge teams, we are eagerly awaiting the results of Phase 1. Will we be one of the lucky teams selected to move on? Looking around, there are so many good videos, web sites, and robot designs. Wow! So many teams worked hard to shine!

Our team is from three different areas of NC so it takes a lot of work to get together. But our parents were really cool. We met many times during the week and the weekend to get all of our video footage together.

Phase 1 closed Saturday morning at 2:59 am est. and Friday morning we still had a lot of editing. We had no idea how labor intensive the editing process would be. We spent the whole day trying to make our video exactly three minutes. It is amazing how much time that video editing takes.

Good luck to all of the teams! Being part of this competition was a lot of fun!

Tad

Microbots Post MoonBots Research Video

Finishing Moonbots Phase 1

It was so much fun making our video! Going over the video segments was a lot of fun, too! I'm really glad we planned it all out in advance though! I never would have guessed 3 minutes would fill up so fast!! I hope we get to move on to Phase 2 so we can use our bloopers in our Team Documentary! :P

I really hope we move on to Phase 2 mostly because I am really looking forward to programming our robot for the whole Challenge! I am totally excited about the camera and the compass! I have never programmed those components before and I think our newest build is totally ready for The Challenge!

I'm having a lot of fun! Thanks for inviting me to do Moonbots with you! Go Microbots!

Gala

Moving Forward With Moonbots

We are moving forward with our work on the LEGO robot design and video presentation. The script is now completed and we start video today. Gala has done an awesome job in getting all of this together. We may go shoot it over at the Turtle Nest or at my house. I am installing Adobe Premiere on my laptop to get ready to edit all of the parts. I have been thinking about whether to add animation or compose the music behind the credits. We will see how much time that we have.

The robot is just about done. Our original design just didn't get over the ridge in the center of the map so we changed it up a bit.We now have the camera attached and will do some programming today as well. We still have a lot to do and not much time left. It always seems like our meetings fly by.

The team is having a really great time and is really working hard. Zack and I have known each other for four years and really like building LEGO robots. Gala was part of our FRC team and is an awesome programmer, researcher, and brings everything together. I feel like we have all worked together for a long time!

Microbots to do Moonbots

A subset of the Microbots team is planning to do the Moonbots challenge.Right now, Tad, Zach, and Gala are signing up to build a robot to explore the moon's surface. This challenge is very similar to FLL.

We know that there is at least one other team from North Carolina. It should be fun to complete with them. Over the next couple of days, we will post our progress as we sign up for this marvelous challenge.

Tad (below) has begun to design the robot and all indications are that it will run on the rough surface that we will need to run on. There are no autonomous programs yet but using a bluetooth controller, we layed out a basic course for the robot. It can easier make its way through the obstacles.

Good luck to our fellow teams and we can't wait to compete with you (virtually) in stage 2 if we are invited.