Tech Events Around Seattle (Mostly)

Seattle Robotics Society: April 17 from 10 to noon @ Renton Techical College

Contact Lenses for Superhuman Vision - Professor Professor Babak Pariz will present on Contact Lenses for Superhuman Vision. Imagine a contact lens that displays active content directly on the wearer's eye, enabling useful facts or information to pop into their field of view, the creation of virtual crosshairs, or virtually any kind of information content. This technology could help vision-impaired people, provide holographic driving control panels, or open a unique way to surf the Web on the go. Come hear about the latest on this fascinating technology.

Engineering Discovery Days: April 23 & 24 @ UW

Formerly known as "Open House," Engineering Discovery Days continues the tradition of sharing our work with students, teachers and families. While both days are open to all, each day has a primary focus.

• Friday, April 23: Grades 4 through 8
• Saturday, April 24: High Schoolers, Community College Students and Pre-Majors 

Science Fair at Ridgewood: May 6 from 6 to 8pm

A chance to be seen in our shirts and recruit for team “Littler lost robot” FLL team and maybe fundraise.

Seattle Robotics Society: May 15 from 10 to noon @ Renton Techical College

Alchemy Project - Professor Pedro Domingos will talk about the Alchemy Project. Alchemy is a software package providing a series of algorithms for statistical relational learning and probabilistic logic inference, based on the Markov logic representation. Alchemy allows you to easily develop a wide range of AI applications, including collective classification, link prediction, entity resolution, social network modeling, and information extraction.

Maker Faire May 22 & 23 @ San Mateo Fairgrounds (San Francisco)

50K nerds, geeks, artists, and makers of all kinds come together.

Seattle Robotics Society: June 19 from 10 to noon @ Renton Techical College

Brain-Robot Interfaces - Professor Rajesh Rao, Associate Professor at UW (CS department) will talk about brain-robot interfaces

Power Tool Drag Races: Sometime in June

Robothon: Sometime in October?

Want to build a line following robot or a sumo-bot

A few other groups that have interesting geeky events

• http://metrixcreatespace.com/
• http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsea/

Interview with First Founder

Dean Kamen was interviewed on NPR Talk of the Nation on Jan 5. This is a the link to the podcast of that interview.

First PSA

Keanu Reeves stars in a First Public Service Announcement... Totally Awesome!

Competition Video

We had some practice time before the competition began.



We shot the high goal and some outside goal shots.



This is our second match. We were the only team to score any goals.

Practice before competition

We had a power outage just before the FTC Washington state competition. I powered up the generator to run a couple of lights and a heater.

"Little Lost Robot" wins Award in State Robotics Championship

Fairwood’s Team “Little Lost Robot” Win’s Award in State Robotics Championship

“I do not fear computers; I fear the lack of them” Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov is quoted on the back of the team’s shirts and inspired the team name. Fairwood’s own robotics team, “Little Lost Robot”, competed in the Washington State First Tech Challenge robotics championships on  December 13.

The Team placed 19th out of 31 teams. This is not bad for a first year team of 12 & 13 year olds against highschool teams with many years of experience. "Little Lost Robot" also won the ‘FTC Think Award’ for the team that best reflects the “journey” as they experienced it through the engineering design process during the build season. The award is based on the design and documentation in their Engineering Notebook .  The team’s notebook details the design and build stage of the team’s robot.  Journal entries include the steps, brainstorms, designs, re-designs, successes, and those ‘interesting moments’ when things weren’t going as planned.

Pictured above are the "Little Lost Robot" team members
Back: Edson Smith, Nick Stafford, Kempton Snyder, Adam Willetts

Front: Ryan Hess, Chris Madden, and Jack Kelly

Pictured above is a practice match for the team (Robot #3721).  The task for the robot was to release, pick up, and shoot balls into one of 3 goals, ranging from 1 to 10 points.

Three team members participated in each match. The driver, (Kempton above center), and an operator to shoot the balls, (Chris above center, Jack, and Nick) and one coach (Edson above center). Team Little Lost Robot was the top point earner in 2 out of their 5 matches.

The team was made up of 7 boys but it took the support of many family members. The team is already looking forward to next season and is raising money selling subscriptions to Make magazine and looking for engineering mentors and local companies as sponsors. If you are interested in supporting your local robotics team email coach Jim jim@smith.net

Congratulations FTC Team #3721 - Little Lost Robot!!

The "Axe" is working!



It took a few tries. We have just 6 days to competition.