We are holding a Dinner and Silent Auction Fundraiser on April 20 to help fund our team activities this year. We hope many members of the community in Esko and surrounding areas will join us for some food and fun(draising). There will be lots of bargains at our Silent Auction, as well!
Week Zero is the time to put some finishing touches on the robot, get some driving practice, and network with some amazing FRC teams! We were able to participate in the Centurion-Krawler Week Zero Scrimmage at Centennial High School this past Saturday, and gained some valuable experience for the upcoming competitions.
In talking to some of our SubZero Team 5690 members, we were able to learn their thoughts on where they think we’re at right now in regards to our robot’s build and capabilities. 
Hunter, a veteran fabrication department member, said, “I learned just getting the feel of what needs to be done to be consistent in repairs and the routine, and giving the robot a check-up. I’m looking forward to having the robot perform pretty well now that we know everything is working.”
Every department is important in putting the robot together, as Sarah and Cassie, first year electrical members, found out. “Just learning how to wire and connect things, and making sure everything works was a huge takeaway from the scrimmage because if one thing was off the robot wouldn’t work.
Organization is crucial! We’re looking forward to the experience and seeing the hard work pay off.” Like every other year, our main driver will have a critical role during competition. This year’s driver, Logan, was most surprised at the scrimmage “when the robot fell over.” At our regional competitions in Duluth and Iowa, he’s most looking forward to “the robot not falling over!”
Following the debut of this year’s robots at the scrimmage, other 5690 team members shared their perspectives on things that surprised them about this year’s POWER UP℠ gameplay. Camden, a second year programmer, was expecting more diversity in the robots, but he found that the designs were more or less the same. 
He also stated that, “Climbing at the end will be a challenge, and avoiding the penalty points of hitting the scale is going to be integral in this game.” Alec, a 3rd-year mentor in programming agreed that climbing will be the biggest challenge, noting that, “the robots barely had enough room to fit on the platform, let alone climb.” Strategy department member Skylar was “surprised [at] how some of the teams were playing the games, a lot more skills than what we originally thought. Some major challenges for this year we found out will include picking robots that are going to be compatible with ours because of different and similar skills.”
The week zero scrimmage also allowed our scouters the opportunity to see how everything is going to work and where their role fits in. Gage a second year scout, and Carsen, a first year scout, said “it’s harder than it was last year because it’s all stopwatch timing and thinking on your feet. I’m [Carsen] personally looking forward to seeing if anyone can climb. From a scouting perspective, keeping score and not missing any information is going to be the trick this year.”
Just three days after the scrimmage, and a frenzy of last-minute adjustments, our robot went into the bag to await our first regional competition, the Lake Superior Regional on March 8 – 10 at the DECC in Duluth. The event is free and open to the public, so we invite everyone to attend and see how exciting a FIRST Robotics Competition can be! We’re excited to see how our robot will perform this season.
On January 6, the 2018 FIRST Robotics Competition season officially began with the release of the POWER UP game animation and rule manual. SubZero Robotics Team 5690 joined 22 other teams at the Marshall Performing Arts Center at UMD for the Kickoff event hosted by Duluth East Daredevils Team 2512, with Denfeld Nation Automation Team 4009 helping with registration. SubZero and the Iron Mosquitoes Team 5653 from Babbitt assisted with handing out the Kit of Parts following the game reveal.
Kickoff then moved to the home of the Duluth Marshall School TopperBots Team 4230 where we debriefed with six fellow Northland FRC teams about this year’s challenge. We would like to thank the teams who participated and strategized with us over lunch and in breakout sessions: Carlton Doomsday Dogs Team 7041, Team 6044 Circuit Breakers, Moose Lake Robotics, Hermantown Talons 5232 Robotics, Gogebic Range Robotics, Babbitt Iron Mosquitos 5653, and Marshall Topperbots 4230. Big thanks to TopperBots for co-hosting this event with us for the second year.
Following the worshops at Marshall, we headed back to Esko for the rest of the day to organize and formulate a plan for SubZero to proceed at full force into the 6-week build season. Good luck to everybody this competition season!
From March 22nd through the 25th, we attended the Iowa Regional to compete. We were doing very well throughout the entire competition. We even got to choose an alliance! Together, we topped the other robotic teams holding the title of Iowa Regional Champions, along with getting a spot at Worlds!
The regional was held at Cedar Falls, Iowa. It was the first time our team had attended a second regional in one season, as well as our first time competing at a regional outside of Minnesota. We arrived with determination to perform even better than our last competition and even more, qualify for the FIRST Championship in St. Louis, Missouri. After nine qualification matches, we were ranked 3rd out of 54 teams. As the third alliance captain we invited The Metal Mustangs from Overland Park, Kansas as well as the PioNerds from St. Paul, MN, to “chill with us” during eliminations. In quarterfinals, we played against the 6th ranked alliance which was led by our friends at Denfeld DNA Robotics.
Fortunately for us, we won the first two matches to move on to the semifinals. Our alliance then faced the 2nd ranked alliance in an unprecedented semifinals. We won the first match, tied the next three, lost the fifth match, and then went on to win the sixth tiebreaker match. Our performance during semifinals was talked about throughout the robotics community for the next week. Our team moved onto the finals, where we faced the first ranked alliance which included another Northland team, the Duluth East Daredevils. While we lost the first match, our drive team pulled it together and won the next two!
This victory in the finals not only meant that we were the Iowa Regional Champions, but also that we would be attending the Championships in St. Louis, Missouri! We are incredibly proud of our drive team that helped us climb to the top! Our team can all agree we are extremely excited to compete at Worlds!
This Saturday, the kickoff finally started! Now that we know the topic of the challenge, the team is pumped to start the build season!
Our team has been waiting for this moment since last years season ended. We came together with pizza and other snacks of course to do a special viewing of the 2017 teaser video! Did I mention pizza was involved? Very serious team meeting.
The SubZero team is thrilled to announce our Lego Robot summer camp is finally happening! It gives students opportunities to learn and engage what the Lego robots are capable for. The students objective is to program their robot just right to make it go over various obstacles.
This season has been such an exciting time for everyone on the team. Our growth from this season to the last has been truly remarkable.
We have had an amazing build season this year. We began at first sharing ideas, collaborating with other teams, and analyzing this year’s game. Juggling many different ideas from team members, we finally came to a consensus on our robot design. We had many new experiences this year. This ranged from building bumpers, to reaching out to sponsors in order to have a sustainable build season – something we had to be less focused on last year due to working on simple robot design. With mentor knowledge, many late nights, and student dedication, we were able to produce a robot we thought would best fit the game requirements. That is exactly what we did.
Our competition season started off on March 3rd-5th at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center (DECC) for the Lake Superior Regional. Competition qualification matches started off looking up. We juggled between first, second, and third place during the second day of the regional, finishing the day in 1st place out of 63 teams. At the end of the three day regional we received the Industrial Design Award that celebrates form and function in an efficiently designed machine that effectively addresses the game challenge. We also ended the challenging three day competition as finalists with a record of 11-5-0. With being finalists, we were offered the opportunity to attend the FIRST Championships in St. Louis, Missouri on April 27th-30th at the Edward Jones Dome.
Being able to meet and work with teams from many countries all over the world was a fantastic experience for everyone on the team. We began qualification matches with motor trouble on the left side of our robot. After an hour of work from the build team, we were able to get B.A.R.D. (our robot name) back in commission. Later in the competition, we broke a shaft for the jointed arm due to friction. After these issues, we were back in shape. We finished the Championships in 38th out of 75 teams with a record of 5-5-0.
We were also able to attend the Minnesota State High School League Competition on May 20th and 21st at the Mariucci Arena in Minneapolis. We had to make minor adjustments to the arm and shooter similar to the Championship tournament. At the end of the day, we finished with a record of 3-5-0 in 19th place. We were very excited to participate in this tournament as one of the top 30 teams in Minnesota invited to compete. Minnesota has 208 First Robotics teams as of the 2016 season.
We would like to thank all our sponsors, coaches, mentors, parents, and finally all the students for making this year the success it has become.
Please check our Facebook page for the most recent updates from our team. The Facebook page is titled “Esko SubZero Robotics Team 5690.”
Our qualification matches will begin promptly at 9:19am tomorrow and we encourage you to stream our match. You can find the Galileo division live stream here: http://www.firstchampionship.org/watch-FRC-live
SubZero Robotics - Team 5690 