It's been a lot of planning, organizing and soon to be setting up and it's almost here!  The 4th annual ROBOCON Festival! 

This is a free festival we put on every year for our community. It showcases all levels of FIRST and VEX Robotics, with a full FRC field for other teams to come out and be a part of.  We utilize each robotics field to have attendees obtain their ROBO Driver's License by driving each of the different robots on their competition fields.  For the highest level, FRC, attendees must watch a match first, get a little coaching from the participating drive teams and then drive the robots in a full competition match! This is by far the biggest attraction!

We also have a wide array of interactive and engaging STEM related activities and exhibitors for the public to enjoy. 

It'll be a week of setup and getting everything in order, but by Saturday we'll be ready! Looking forward to seeing the other 18 FRC teams who are coming out to play on the Steamworks field one more time and all the generous volunteers who offered their time to help make this event a success. 

Many thanks to the View Newsgroup staff who helped immensely this year! It's going to be an even better event due to your amazing help and efforts! 

For more info visit the ROBOCON website and Facebook page

The Lapeer Area View - ROBOCON returns July 22nd at the Center for Innovation 

Some photos from the 2016 ROBOCON Festival

Our team competed in The Big Bang Competition at the Taylor Sportsplex on July 7-8th.  The off season event was hosted by Team 280 TnT and had 23 FRC teams competing. 

Since competing at the World Championship, we've made a few changes to our robot, so it was nice to see how things would work and if we needed to make more alterations. We also had to have a new pilot for this competition as our season pilot was a senior, but also unable to attend each day. He did a great job!

We held 1st place through the end of qualifications which gave us the 1st seed alliance captain position.  There were only 23 teams so each one got to compete in the finals on an alliance. One alliance was able to pick no third robot since there was not a 24th team and get point allowances for going in with only two. We were hoping for this, to try something different, but the 3rd alliance chose it before the opportunity could get back to us! We still had a great alliance that fought hard in the elimination matches! 
We chose Team 862 Lightning Robotics (part of the winning alliance at St. Louis World Champs) and our 3rd robot was Team 280B TnT Divas, three girls who built their robot in two weeks and this was their first time competing! So awesome! 
Ending the competition as Event Finalists and taking home a really neat looking trophy was a great way to end a "blast" of a competition!! 

Thanks to Team 280 TnT for hosting a great event and to Teams 862 and 280B for joining our alliance and taking it all the way to the end with us!