Kevin Boyle

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...

Tune Genie Joins as Platinum Sponsor!

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Feb 17, 2016 | Team Updates |

The radio and promotion services company has joined the team as a Platinum Sponsor. TuneGenie™ gives your brand the ability to display music and make it interactive. Their player bar combines music display and streaming for all devices. You can see it in use at WVBI and at thousands of sites around the world. We thank the Tune Genie for their support of...

It’s Rolling!

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Feb 17, 2016 | Team Updates |

Our new 8 wheel chassis is now rolling. The minor problems we wrote about yesterday were resolved and everything came together. We all spent a lot of time in the garage yesterday–especially Mr. Anderson. The result looks...

More Chassis Progress

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Feb 15, 2016 | Team Updates |

Today we finished the fabrication of the drive bays, which is the most complex part of our 8 wheel drive chassis. We have an alignment problem with a few of the chain hubs, but it looks to be solvable pretty quickly. Which is good. Tick, tock. We also got a final plan for our new compact electronics bay. We should be able to cut that out tomorrow and get things mounted. Here are some pictures of the assembled drive bays with one of the cross-members to give an idea of the appearance of the final...

Build Week 5 Update

Posted by Kevin Boyle | Feb 15, 2016 | Team Updates |

We got a got done this week (instead of just designing and planning). Among other things: We designed a new electronics deck to fit with our 8 wheel drive chassis. We had to cut the size by two thirds. To make it fit we are using both sides of the deck and will have a kid plate to protect the bottom side. We’ll put the motor controllers and power distribution box on the bottom as we don’t think we’ll need to get to them to often. If we do, for bolts will give us access. We finished programming (pretty much) for teleoperated mode. We added a precision mode to our drive system and got controllers working for our two arm motors (including precision modes for them). All that is left is to add a control for the trunk release solenoid we’re going to use for our boulder flicker. We finished fabrication of our lacrosse style boulder grabber and tosser. Mr. Anderson did a lot of work on this. The parts for our 8 wheel drive chassis finally arrived. We have gobs of 5×2 C-channel and 5×1 rectangle stock. We bgean fabrication of the new chassis this weekend. We got a lot done, but there is a lot to do. Mr. Anderson welded the gears onto our wheel hubs. It is nice to have that task out of the way....