S u m m e r 2011 MONKEY BUSINESS MonkeyNews of the Lynbrook High School Robotics “Funky Business Monkeys,” FIRST Team #846 In this issue P.1 A New Year, a New Adventure P.1 Championships at Anaheim P.2 A Summer on the Moon P.2 Beyond the Classroom P.3 A Blast From the Past Botball P.4 Ten Years of Lynbrook Robotics Championships at Anaheim By Diane Wang A New Year, a New Adventure t is easy for anyone to collect I ping pong balls and foam Welcome to the Lynbrook Robotics Team! Hi Team! blocks, and moving paper air- I hope you all enjoyed your summer va- Welcome to Lynbrook Robotics! In the planes across a table takes cation monkeying around and are eager to ex- past, our team has consisted of people with in- merely seconds to complete. pand your skills. Lynbrook Robotics wants to terests in math, writing, art and everything else However, Botball 2011 brought help you extend your scientific and mathemati- in between. Everyone, regardless of skill, has a a challenge for students: to cal knowledge beyond the classroom environ- place on our team. complete the same tasks using ment and apply them to our club. You can get The best chance to get involved is pre- only autonomously-run Lego involved immediately by helping us prepare this sented during build season. Our program is cen- robots. year’s robot for our first competition of the tered on the FIRST Robotics Competition, For the first four weeks of school year, CalGames, which requires us to summer, team members trav- this October. build a fully functional eled to Oak Grove High School Building a robot robot in 6 weeks. We every day to mentor their will involve skills such spend this time design- two Botball teams, collectively as computer program- ing, machining, and known as the Eaglebots. Re- ming, 3D CAD design, assembling a 120-pound gardless of specialty, students physics, and math; how- robot, alongside men- learned to manage all aspects of ever, no prior experience tors who are profession- building a fully functional, au- is required. Our veteran als in their various tonomous robot. Preparation for members and mentors fields. This process is the competition became in- will gladly guide you and challenging but gratify- creasingly stressful as the days help you develop these skills. ing, especially after seeing a robot that you’ve numbered down. Besides the technical challenges of build- worked on come alive on the competition field. “Seven hours a day ing a robot, we provide opportunities for you to Robotics has a lot to offer and I know seemed like a lot of time to showcase a variety of skills. For example, artists you all do too. High school is a time to take work, but the time always dis- and designers have a chance to improve our chances. It’s a time to try a bit of everything, appeared by the end,” said team website and to design banners. Our club also because all of the things you do now will impact member sophomore Michael presents opportunities for writers, public speak- your future one way or another. Get involved, Chang. ers, and math whizzes. I welcome all of you to take the initiative to try and learn, and I guaran- Sixty-four teams across join in on the fun! tee, it will all be worth it. Go Funky Monkeys! the globe attended Botball’s annual international competi- tion, GCER, in Orange Coun- Alric Siu Annie Yang ty, California. Teams faced off Lynbrook Robotics Co-President 2011-2012 Lynbrook Robotics Co-President 2011-2012 in a variety of competitions, See BOTBALL, Page 3 [email protected] 2 A Summer On the Moon Beyond the Vice president Brian Axelrod shares his Classroom experiences of working at NASA. Members of the Lynbrook By Jocelyn Shieh Robotics team pursue their fter hearing about an available summer outside interests. A internship from NASA researcher Mark Leon, Lynbrook Robotics vice-president Brian Robert Ying: Axelrod decided to take up the challenge. While most other rising juniors worked retail jobs and A group photo of the team from the NASA Ames For summers of my sophomore studied for their SAT’s, Axelrod spent his sum- Research Center. and junior year, I interned at Cy- mer researching and developing projects for press Semiconductor. It was a NASA instead. his two years’ worth of experience from robot- great opportunity for me to expe- “Since NASA is a government organiza- ics. For example, several programs used at rience engineering in real-life tion, they tend to have a larger focus on educa- NASA were similar to those used while pro- situations, and ended up being tion,” said Axelrod. “I believed that as a stu- gramming the robot. more engaging than I'd expected. dent, I would get better opportunities to learn “When I first started, I wasn’t clueless Some of the things I worked on about and experience different things there.” about the systems. I knew most of their func- were optical navigation systems, Axelrod’s main assignment, the Lunar tions and how to resolve issues concerning capacitive touch screens, and Micro Rover project, was to design and produce them,” said Axelrod. “One time one of our software development, both firm- a lightweight rover that would be inexpensive to mentor software engineers was confused over ware for the Cypress PSoC archi- send to the moon yet efficient enough to operate why the speed controllers were spitting out er- tecture and drivers for the An- well there. Several problems arose during the rors and I was able to solve the issue and ex- droid OS. project, such as low bandwidth and high latency plain to him why it was happening.” communications. However together with the In return, Axelrod gained valuable expe- Lunar Micro Rover team, Axelrod was able to rience that he plans to implement into robotics Miles Chan: make great strides towards solving these prob- this year. lems. “While most of the things we did at This summer, I went on tour as “Quite frankly, the typical work done by NASA wouldn’t be possible on our team be- principal second violin with the high schoolers there is manual labor, so once I cause of financial issues, I learned a great deal El Camino Youth Symphony managed to fix the problems puzzling the other about electronics such as radios and speed con- (ECYS) in Europe. The orches- interns and some software engineers as well, I trollers and machinery such as lathes and CNC tra was well received by audienc- gained a lot of respect,” said Axelrod. “It was a mills.” es in France and Spain, who good feeling, realizing that I was able to provide “It was a great experience,” Axelrod forced upon us 2 - 3 encores a valuable help beyond what they expected of said, “but I missed working with my team and concert. Needless to say, I had a high school students.” looked forward to the beginning of the school great introduction to European Axelrod credits his successes at NASA to year.” culture with my musical bud- dies. I am still with ECYS for the upcoming season; we appear next at Flint Center on Oct. 29! Fundraising at Concours By Vincent Yao Lucy Mou: n Sunday, August 21st, Lynbrook Ro- Over the summer, I went to Nic- O botics went to Concours d’Elegance at aragua to volunteer. It was inter- Pebble Beach, CA. They sold concessions to esting to see how different life event-goers in order to raise money for the there was compared to life in the club. The team was also able to observe hun- U.S. Aside from the painting dreds of different cars, ranging from classic houses, building cement plat- models to brand new, luxury sports cars. forms and laying down pipelines, Members studied the designs, hoping to apply we also had fun swimming in them to future robots. Some members were Lake Nicaragua, the beach, and a lucky enough to see celebrities, including Jay freshwater lagoon. My favorite Leno, from afar. Overall, the members had a part of the trip was trying to great time helping their team while also en- teach a group of Spanish- joying the show for themselves. speaking Nicaraguan kids Eng- lish without knowing any Span- UPPER RIGHT: One of the hundreds of cars that ish. Though much of the volun- were at the event and in mint condition. teer work was manual labor, the RIGHT: Rishi Debnath and Eric Yeh serving trip was a great experience. customers lining up at their stand. [email protected] © Lynbrook High School Robotics Team 3 Botball Continued from page 1 including seeding matches and the highly anticipated double- elimination matches. Robots had to score through a number of ways, and with each task weighted a different amount, teams were forced to prioritize their strategies. The autono- Clockwise from top left: Stephen Giandomenico visiting Stonehenge; working mous aspect of the competition on assembling the drivetrain; explaining physics and circular motion to rookie also brought its own challeng- team members. es. “Even the smallest bump on the game field could imme- A Blast From the Past diately knock your robot off track. We learned by the end Former team president pays a visit to the Funky Monkeys. that effectively using sensors By Jocelyn Shieh was the only way to ensure a reliable robot,” said team pres- ident senior Alric Siu. ven now, you may remember Stephen Gi- “I am looking to continue on in the soft- Pre-conference work- E andomenico, the good-natured president of ware field,” said Giandomenico.