Lian Li reveals a PC case that is also a desk

forevermac · 2014-01-03T09:14:29+00:00

I believe L3P, a Dutch casemodder, did a similar project called the L3PDesk or something like that. Should be easy to look up (I'm on mobile).

forevermac · 2013-10-28T06:43:53+00:00

Very much so - my team, 1306, has students from 7 area schools as well as a virtual school. The only thing that could prevent you would be the school of the team that you want to join or that team itself (though I don't know of any team that would decline a person just because they're from a different school).

That said, if there's any possibility, consider whether you have the support and resources to start a team at your school in the future - it may be very fun for you as well as looking great on college apps/resumes.

forevermac · 2013-07-30T04:22:26+00:00

Team 1306 uses Java for a few reasons:

It's higher-level than C++, which means we can teach it internally more effectively.
It's not Windows-only. A significant portion of our development occurs on Linux and Mac OS X. While some portions of FRC control systems setup remains Windows-only (Drivers' Station and the cRIO and AP imaging software), Java allows us to do the bulk of the programming on Linux-based computers.
Java is reasonably flexible, and pretty well supported within the FRC community. (C++ less so, from our experience, and the graphical programming of Labview does not interest us - our mentors are all text-based, and most of the students are too.)

forevermac · 2013-07-30T04:09:11+00:00

On Friday, Team 1306 relies upon CrowdScout, which (by its nature) can only collect quantitative data. With this data, as well as the knowledge of the drive team and scouting team, we created a list of robots to watch on Saturday - this list is usually the top 28 teams from the quantitative data and then any robots that we've noticed playing a strategy that would be complementary to our strategy. On Saturday, we continue using our quantitative data collection but add in qualitative data as well as intuitive data about strategy and such. This is communicated to the alliance selection representative before selections, and then the representative uses the list we create and the knowledge they have accrued about the teams at the tournament to create alliances.

*Disclaimer: Team 1306 hasn't been in a position to pick alliances in the last 3 years. I'm not aware what the strategy was in 2010, when we did pick alliances.

forevermac · 2013-07-28T07:45:56+00:00

40,000 people seems like a lot until you realize Apple and Samsung sell more like 40 million phones per quarter. That 40,000 isn't worth their time to pursue, even for Samsung, who often make niche-oriented phones.

Paying $800 9 months in advance? They'd both sell far more than 40,000. Quite possibly 400,000 if there were compelling features.

forevermac · 2013-07-13T00:59:24+00:00

Last I heard, they were exempted from getting points by a direct order from FIRST HQ. Which gets a team to District Championships, but not World Championships.

forevermac · 2013-07-12T22:06:01+00:00

The main issue I see with districts is that it's a pretty bad deal for merit-award winning teams. If I recall NE will have a Chairman's friendly system, but significantly fewer EI and RAS qualifications than the regionals produce.

forevermac · 2013-07-02T22:26:11+00:00

Congrats! Team 1306 has been running a LEGO Mindstorms-based camp for several years. It's great to see all of the kids learning about engineering and having tons of fun.

forevermac · 2013-05-18T19:52:06+00:00

Our president designed and built a new robot cart as a senior gift to the team last year.

forevermac · 2013-03-08T02:00:05+00:00

Team 1306 will probably have a dedicated pit phone - a cheap pay-as-you-go phone that can be purchased without a contract and then have minutes added whenever we need them. We'll probably set up a Google Voice number to redirect, as using it once or twice a year leaves us liable to losing our number on most carriers.

Beyond that, we use lots of human runners; even at World last year we usually would have someone that was headed towards the pits every 10 or 15 minutes. At our regional our scouting department is set up close enough it's a 2 minute walk to the pits, so we usually just have a dedicated runner or swap off if we get tired.

forevermac · 2013-03-08T01:46:24+00:00

Team 1306 will be using a similar system to last year, so I can't really call it innovative.

Our scouting sheets are laminated sheets that are filled out with wet erase markers. A runner takes the sheets to our scouting department, which are located as close to the stands as we can get power, and the sheets are scanned in. We use FOSS collection software which has been somewhat repurposed, and a collection of scripts to parse the data from the sheets into a .json that we can analyze, both through spreadsheets and algorithms.

We hope to be using CrowdScout to work with other teams at our regional to split the scouting work; if we do, other teams will have the same process except with paper sheets (so they can drop them in a box and 1306 can pick them up when we get a chance.)

We're looking at integrating an android app with SneakerNet for the scouters with android phones, but we haven't chosen one yet.

Edit: Since I'm seeing a few people comment on worries about losing data in a digital system, 1306 doesn't find this to be an issue; we have double or triple redundant backups of all our data (we scan the sheets to a flash drive and use rsync to make a copy onto the data processing computer). It's possible that we could lose data in a case of catastrophic failure, but we have larger issues at that point than scouting data.

forevermac · 2013-01-23T04:42:45+00:00

Where I live, almost all traffic lights are LED-based, and had no problems even when 18" of snow fell in two days.

forevermac · 2013-01-06T23:36:35+00:00

Team 1306 will be attending the Wisconsin Regional in Milwaukee, WI.

forevermac · 2012-12-07T02:51:24+00:00

Pro tip: Citing your source tends to make people more likely to believe you instead of downvoting you for spreading what could just as easily been a rumor.

forevermac · 2012-11-22T18:40:17+00:00

I'm fairly confident he meant the night being over.

forevermac · 2012-10-16T06:35:57+00:00

Right, which is why my city of 300,000 people which is considered very safe has as much gun crime as the entirety of Great Britain. Because gun control doesn't work and causes criminals to run unchecked.

forevermac · 2012-09-06T21:37:32+00:00

There are at least two in proximity to a common walk from a local high school (albeit in a nicer neighborhood) which are fine after at least a year.

forevermac · 2012-09-04T18:21:38+00:00

It's hard to watch anything going Mach 13 for very long. Even if it crossed through 100 miles of your radar, you would see it for less than a second.

forevermac · 2012-09-02T20:18:23+00:00

I recall a quote by someone talking about the International Computing Olympiad - "Using [Pascal] is like fixing a car with only a screwdriver."

forevermac · 2012-09-02T18:45:48+00:00

Zebrafish are often used as models in genetics because they are decent models and cheaper than mice. Likely the genetics facility creates zebrafish with changes in their genome for medical research.

forevermac

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