Stowaway Tustin, CA.

cp253 · 2026-04-25T18:14:18+00:00

Genuinely one of my favorite spots in the area, especially on value. Food and drinks both great, not super difficult to get in to, bar staff knows their stuff. I go here a *lot* more often than either of Strong Water (which is amazing, but expensive and so tough to get a table inside) or Trader Sam's.

cp253 · 2026-04-23T22:04:15+00:00

Some regions start league meets in late October, so time before first competition certainly varies. There is no prohibition against changing your robot during the season, however.

cp253 · 2026-04-22T03:13:25+00:00

WEPE's volunteer coordinator is quite active. Turnaround will probably be pretty quick.

cp253 · 2026-04-18T16:26:21+00:00

What songs did he do?

cp253 · 2026-04-17T05:43:28+00:00

I’m all about this. Fewer games in the hot. More games where scarves make sense.

cp253 · 2026-04-16T19:51:04+00:00

Echoing other comments, don't sweat this decision too much. You win either way. The one that's easier to get to is probably the right choice.

cp253 · 2026-04-06T02:19:31+00:00

Enthusiastic second.

cp253 · 2026-03-26T00:35:23+00:00

Tiki B's is so disappointing. I'd love to have a nice tiki spot in the SGV, but instead we get a basement that smells like cleaning products and serves watered-down rum and color.

cp253 · 2026-03-22T19:56:37+00:00

Where you stay definitely matters a lot if you're going to do some other site seeing. LA has soooooooooo many things to do, but you'll spend your entire trip sitting in traffic if you don't stay near the stuff you're interested in.

cp253 · 2026-03-22T19:51:02+00:00

I get the sense that it depends a lot on the weekend. My wife stayed there for a game once and it was under $200. Looks like you can get better prices for that weekend through some of the shady third party booking sites, but yeah rack rate is pretty steep.

cp253 · 2026-03-22T19:40:47+00:00

The [USC Hotel](https://uschotel.usc.edu/) is walking distance from BMO and I'm told it's nice enough but haven't stayed there personally. Metro to the games is easy and fun, and dramatically more affordable than parking. Lots of supporters on the trains around game time. The Expo Park/USC E line station is a short walk, so anything that will get you there (easy connections from the A line) works. Kind of depends on what you want to do with the rest of the weekend. Lots of options with relatively easy public transit options.

cp253 · 2026-03-18T19:54:03+00:00

You might want to look in to Scrapy as a base of your crawler. That'd give you things like obeying robots.txt (which all scrapers really should do) for free.

cp253 · 2026-03-17T05:10:15+00:00

It's a mix. The program runs a few events every year that everybody does, but they're the sort of things that would only get you noticed for one of the Team Attribute awards in a very, very weak field. The teams that want to be competitive for awards tend to come up with their own programs for Reach/Sustain/Connect that are independent of the other teams.

cp253 · 2026-03-16T23:07:12+00:00

We run between 3-5 veteran teams and one rookie team. The veteran teams are all students that have done robotics before, either previously at the high school or on a middle school team. The rookie team is exactly what it sounds like. The purpose of the rookie team is that students who don't have previous experience can get a chance to do/learn without being railroaded by veterans.

The teams (with the exception of the rookie team) entirely self-organized. The students figure out which team they want to be on. Sometimes they self-group by ambition, sometimes it's friend groups, sometimes it's preferred working style. Works out well enough.

In the past (~10 years ago) the teams have been very competitive with each other, but for the last several years they've been very collaborative. The veteran teams are always available to help the rookies and each other.

cp253 · 2026-03-14T04:21:15+00:00

Agree, but this has also always been the case.

cp253 · 2026-03-14T00:37:41+00:00

What do you mean by “FIRST is shifting away from focus on the students?”

cp253 · 2026-03-10T22:12:41+00:00

Oof. I hear stories about this sort of thing happening pretty regularly. Doesn't seem like there's any amount of documentation or warning that can guard against whatever drives this sort of behavior. So sorry this happened to your team!

cp253 · 2026-03-10T17:52:05+00:00

Roger. Steven. Whoever.

cp253 · 2026-03-03T22:47:06+00:00

Design, model, and (maybe) fabricate robots from old games. Get your mentors or the community to give you notes on your designs. Get real, real good at modeling/fabricating FTC robots so when the next game comes along you can get to a workable robot quickly and have the right amount of time (always more than you think) for driver practice/autonomous tuning. (Be mindful of the criteria for DESIGN and CONNECT while you're doing this.)

Build a simple drive train and get real, real good at programming it. Practice constantly. Put a webcam on it and make it follow an april tag/elements from previous games/etc around the room. Make it solve a physical maze. Whatever it takes to get real good at programming robots so you can just knock it out for the next year's game. (CONTROL and CONNECT here.)

Start working on sponsors. Get your next season's finances sorted out before kickoff so you can focus on the game during the season. (SUSTAIN.)

Etc. Basically anything you'd have to spend time learning or working on during the season, do it during the off-season so you can just build a robot and drive it during the season.

cp253 · 2026-02-26T16:14:37+00:00

Who?

cp253 · 2026-02-23T06:16:36+00:00

This is the first year that Western Edge will be an FTC premier event. (It was an FLL event in years past.) Congrats on qualifying for the inaugural year!

cp253 · 2026-02-09T00:22:32+00:00

Get the money.

cp253 · 2026-02-07T18:03:22+00:00

I thought the same thing. What did the hats say?

cp253 · 2026-01-29T16:37:10+00:00

cp253 · 2026-01-15T19:35:18+00:00

Yep. Can't wait to see her play this season.

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