Chapter FOUR

Introduction to the FIRST Robotics Competition. Should be quite interesting ;)

 

Chapter FOUR

 

Over the years we have made the most exquisite memories, ones that you won’t even find in any Tolkien novel - we made legends and myths. We were soldiers, builders, and tree climbers, special agents, down hill mountain bike champions, fire-fighters, and kung fu ninjas. The list never ended - and our imagination never seized to enrage our sense of adventure to explode with countless situations, plots and ideas. Whenever our minds would implode, it was only a minuet to a thousand million ideas that would jump to mind anytime soon and we would be on our feet, thinking hard, and working tough. We got up to the most interesting of tasks, such as to build an explosive-gas-thrusted-superzonian- warpspeed-patato-gun. This miserably failed, as the plastic barrel just melted and started folding downwards as to resemble some inept breathing device which was of no use to us. But scenarios such as these never even hindered our path to a very successful infamous life of inventing rather useless gadgets and contraptions, to keep the most ingenious minds occupied for hours. Thus we were on to our next project in less than a few minutes, to which the odds were rather soaring, that we would end up with another new project a few minutes later, due to our previous dismissively unnoticed failure. We mentally unravelled our minds in such adventurous situations as to which to ordinary mind wouldn’t be able to comprehend. We braved the mighty forests in the eerie night - a huge mass of blackness that stretched out before us. I think we would agree there was a cold shrill thriving its way down our spines that night. We (attempted) to build a tree house concealed behind the mass of leaves as to effectively spy on our neighbours. This feat drastically failed and we, mostly I, learned an important lesson that day. Since we had no harnesses, we made use of the simple, everyday object, widely known as a belt, and tied the rope to it. Never have I experience such intense pain, exerting its full flaming brute force on my oh so vulnerable but crack, as to cause a spastic painful ‘wedgy’ burn that left me standing like some western Chuck Norris-rival before a shooting dual. Many such opportunities have presented themselves to our unforgiving imaginations and most of the time we paid dearly for our interesting abnormal ways of self entertainment. Though I fail to understand why, most of the time, it was me paying the price, in a exertion of intense pain and girly screams, which was one of my many guilty talents with which I proudly note leaves many surprised expressions of faces staring in awe.

 

One such adventure, that happened to befall our rather interesting lives, and for no good reason other than that we were ingenious, was the extraordinary happening of something known as the FRC. Every so often we exceed our expectations of what adventurous challenge will drift our way, or what outrageous humoristic subject will tickle the ‘funny’ spots on our brains. We couldn’t predict the happenings of a second in our friendship, everything just happened to flow the way it goes, and it just never went with the flow. And where it goes, was the aspect of this zealous friendship, which made onlookers stare in awe, and bus passengers frown with wonder, or made fellow companions cringe with embarrassment. And the FRC was one of these fantastic opportunities to enhance our friendship with extra uniqueness and adventure.

 

FRC is a very long word, though it might not seem like it right now, let me explain.

FRC: F.I.R.S.T Robotics Competition. F.I.R.S.T: For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology.

 

So basically I took part in the “For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and technology Robotics Competition”. Yes, I like to stretch things out in a descriptive manner to confuse unfortunate company as much as possible. This was one of the bigger more significant events that enriched our friendship with an array and mixture of different emotions and memories.

 

It all started with something very insignificant, something small, a toy that at some point in every little boy’s life enlightened him with endless joy and satisfaction as friends and rivals alike stare in awe of your creation. It all started with LEGO. My mom told me about LEGO robotics, and I agreed to try it out, not too enthusiastic about the thought of reviving old memories, locked away in the ‘juvenile’ part of my brain. After a while Frikkie joined in and we found it rather interestingly enjoyable. Since it started involving motors and ‘spinny’ parts that twist and turn, we thought it was pretty cool. It was only when we started building with the RCX when it became awesomely cool. An RCX is like a little ‘brain’ which you connect all the little motors and sensors to and download any command you wish programmed into its little brain to do the job. This was painstakingly precise, especially when it came to the First Lego League. We decided it would be, in our terms, firkin awesome to enter a competition where you build your own little robot program and complete different missions on a clever three dimensional map. We were wrong. We had a rather spastically small team, and the two other members were quite, well, let’s just say one of them seemed slightly too happy, emphasising his ‘s’ sounds very brightly whilst speaking. One had the characteristics and a way of verbally expressing oneself, which resembled a member of society who lived quite on the “other side of life”. And to put things a little in context, we were still busy designing and building our robot 11:30pm the night before the competition. Tweaking the programs, adjusting designs. But it never really made a difference. We didn’t mind much, since this robot was only a backup.

It didn’t go very well at the FLL, since the robot wasn’t necessarily supposed to fall apart halfway through the match on the ‘corn field’ so cleverly constructed from various LEGO parts. Since we left the nightmare of a task to finalize the programs and design to another member of the team the night before, the cause of our miserable failure wasn’t entirely our fault.

We were very relieved when the whole caboodle was over; after all, we ‘did’ try our ‘best’.

But it was only a little bit later on, that we realized how outrageously cool the whole robotics thing was. We were offered places on the South African FRC team. And we were absolutely, in the most manly way, delighted.

 

As we excepted the great offer, we knew it wasn’t going to be too easy – and it required a lot of dedication, which we definitely had. Building the robot was no easy task, and very time consuming – it took weeks of hard work. Grinding aluminium, drilling holes, carrying out precise critical measurements, and we enjoyed all of it.

We were very dedicated, and turned up every Saturday to carry on constructing this magnificent steel structure that would jump to life with electronics and motors, little flashing lights, sensors, chains, pulley’s, control panels, everything that caused our brains to burst into a uncontrollable fire with amazement and wonder and the urge to get into action and start working. The robot we were building was a replica of the robot being built in Detroit, USA where the rest our team were located.

“Soon” I told myself, “soon I would be there, in America, taking part in the FIRST Robotics World Championships.

Author's Note

yet again, its mostly meant to be exaggerating and humouristic...