Kevin Boyle | bIrobot Team Site

Island Logistics

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Feb 14, 2017 | Team Updates |

Date February 10, 2017 [tree-snow-fog-prairie-dog-800.jpg] Living on an island has its moments. Most of them are glorious, but sometimes not so much especially when you are trying to build an FRC robot in the middle of a northern Michigan winter. Our island home is reachable only by plane from the week before Christmas until the ice clears from the harbor, usually in late March or early April. That means everything coming to and going from the island has to be flown across on one of the two small airlines that server the island — including all of our robot...

Richards Rental Management and BI Real Estate One Join as Sponsors

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Feb 7, 2017 | Team Updates |

We are happy to welcome Richards Rental Management and Beaver Island Real Estet One as Level 2 sponsors of bIrobot! Many thanks to Sheri Richards and her team for their support of FRC Team...

One Week Into Build Season

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Jan 17, 2017 | Team Updates |

We’ve had a busy first week. We’ve identified our performance priorities and have plans for each of the systems we need to build. In this shot, we’re working on what goes where in the frame. We spent a lot of time this weekend sourcing parts and getting our software platform in place to support the hardware we plan to implement. One issue all teams seem to be dealing with is jamming fuel balls, which this stack of balls...

Build Season Begins

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Jan 7, 2017 | Team Updates |

After several months of trying to figure out how the FRC Game Design folks would work steam into this year’s challenge, the mystery is over and the competition parameters are out! Of course, there will be no real steam (at least not generated by boiling water). But there will be figurative steam that is used to get a steampunk style airship ready to launch. It looks like a great game to play and we can’t wait to get started on our robot. Here’s the official Kick-off Video that describes the game (after dome preliminaries. While you watch it, we’re...

Holy robot!!!

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Mar 7, 2016 | Uncategorized |

In their first-ever outing in the FRC competition, the BICS bIrobot Team won honors as a member of the 2nd placed alliance in the Standish District FRC event this weekend. Competing against teams from all over Michigan, the bIrobot team performed at a high level through out the match impressing other competitors enough to be selected as the first pick during the first alliance partner selection round. The team was thrilled and honored to be chosen by the team with the third highest ranking overall at the event up to that point. We’ll have more pictures and video here and at linked sites soon, but right now the team is taking a break after two days of intense competition (they played 19 matches over all with an 8-9-2 record and worked non-stop from 8:00 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and from 7:30: a.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Saturday, plus 5:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Thursday). In the meantime you can see photos and videos on our Twitter feed (see the right column on out=r website). We thank our alliance partners over all the matches, but especially for the finals, for a great introduction to FRC and a thrilling weekend. And we thank all of our sponsors and supporters on and of the island for their interest in and help for our team. Go Islanders! Go...