Again, asleep at the switch...

As usual, I failed to keep up with posting. I seem to always find other things that need doing which put this posting thing further down on the list.

anyway, here it is, probably with lots more forgotten...

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The new season has started, the 2nd year that Margie and I are responsible for the team. At the end of last season, we lost our faculty advisor, her contract wasn't renewed, and until a few weeks ago, we weren't sure if anyone would step up.

Someone did, and we're moving forward again. Thanks, Mrs. Perrault!

Orientation night picked up a slew of new members and some that dropped out early last season have rejoined. It is good to see them back. One of them took the initiative to visit every participant at the business exposition in September. Out of that there was a connection to a web-hosting business who's donated time and space on their servers for our website. Thanks to Eric Pfeifer of RightPath Networks!

At this time, the new host is operational and the web team has a bright future now, to put a slew of neat things on the site.

We've a new subteam: Marketing, and it has a bunch of enthusiastic members who are not only willing to work, but anxious to get started. We've a business plan and we have the start of a presentation to use when soliciting funding. Our prime sponsor cut funding across the board, so we now have opportunity to seek other sponsors, and the marketing team is going full speed ahead.

Yesterday, several of the marketeers visited the Merrimack Rotary Club to inform them of who Team 166 is and what we do. That went very well, and was a good exercise for sharpening their presentation skills.

Training has started and we're doing pretty well with that. There are more mentors helping there and that makes all the difference in the world. Alan Soucy, Steve Beauregard and Al Bourassa have been outstanding throughout last season and now. They're overseeing the training that is being done by the student leads. The Mech crew is massive again this year, so having several mentors assisting is necessary to get everyone up to speed by Kickoff.

Software has been working throughout the summer and are making progress; they're one of several beta test teams and are preparing a session on programming and the use of the multitasking code they developed with the help of a mentor.

Halloween provided an avenue to earn some money; the Town puts on a festival at the local park and T166 volunteered to run the haunted house. What they managed to pull off in 2-3 days effort was amazing, and more amazing was the amount of interest (and money) the house generated.

Where have I been...

Busy, that's where. The year's been a whirlwind of activity centered around FIRST. The team grew by a lot this past September, and that took me quite by surprise; we really were not ready for that number of people to show up.

With all the new students came a bunch of energizing parents and of them all there were three who really stepped up during build. I really don't think we could have gotten thru the season without their help.

That's not to say that everything went according to plan; quite the opposite as it played out. While gaining three mentors, we lost two, one went to the west coast to a new job, the other just walked away, and that really damaged our prospects for success this season. So, being left in the lurch and the only one with an extensive history, I was left to try to keep things moving along as best as I could. When the two MEs who were present for the training sessions didn't show as often as I would have liked, the mechanical designers were left to their own devices, which was a really bad decision to have made.

Anyway, this season's robot was less than superb, although it did manage to support the agreed upon strategy, albeit, poorly. The past several weeks since GSR have been spent redesigning the ball control mechanism, kicker and hook deployment scheme in preparation for Atlanta.