We would like to thank Mr. Alan Coats and Halliburton for graciously donating the entry fee that allowed us to compete at the Razorback Regional in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Because of their generous contribution of our entry fee, we were able to take 7 students and qualify for FRC World Championships. Again, we finished qualifying rounds as the undefeated first seed. We chose 1421-Chaos Robotics and 3612- Gear Hogs as our alliance partners and managed to win a regional completely undefeated with their help. We would also like to thank these two teams for creating a strong alliance that propelled us into the final matches. After becoming the winner of the Razorback Regional, we were also honored with the Excellence in Engineering Award sponsored by Delphi. We look forward to competing in St. Louis in two weeks!
Author: Scott Rippetoe
Competing at the 2013 Alamo Regional
Texas Torque competed at the Alamo Regional in San Antonio this past weekend. We were seeded first and chose teams 624- CRyptonite- and 457- Grease Monkeys- as our alliance partners. The team had an undefeated streak in qualifying matches, but was unfortunately defeated in the third round of semifinals. In a competition filled with 61 incredibly competitive teams, the stands were filled with energy consistently, whether teams won or lost. We again took home the prestigious Industrial Design award sponsored by General Motors.
Texas Torque at the Bayou Regional
16 students from Texas Torque traveled to The Big Easy this past weekend to compete at the Bayou regional competition. At the end of qualifying matches, 1477 was seeded seventh out of 54 teams. Proving we can still push ourselves further as a team, we scored a total of 336 points in teleoperated mode- a massive improvement from the Lonestar Regional only two weeks earlier. As an alliance captain, Torque chose 456 Siege Robotics and 442 Redstone Robotics as our partners. We played competitively in the elimination rounds but were eventually eliminated in the second round of semifinals. However, we were excited to leave New Orleans with the Industrial Design award sponsored by General Motors.
2013 Season- Week 6 Update
We have been very productive so far in this build season. We have several prototypes we are considering for the final design including intake, shooter, and a climbing mechanism. We have completed the CAD of the field as well as the construction of the practice field. Intake has become a top priority for the CAD team. While the mechanical team works diligently on perfecting our shooting mechanism, the programming team configures tracking software. We’re hoping to have both Bravo and Charlie robots completely constructed by the end of the building season.
Halliburton Donates $10,000 to Texas Torque
On January 24, Halliburton donated $10,000 to Texas Torque. For the seventh year, Halliburton renewed their top sponsorship level in support of the FIRST program and Texas Torque’s accomplishments. We offer our greatest appreciation towards Halliburton’s continued involvement in our program.
2013 FIRST Challenge
This year, the FIRST FRC challenge is titled Ultimate Ascent. “ULTIMATE ASCENT SM is played by two competing alliances on a flat, 27 x 54 foot field. Each Alliance consists of three robots, and they compete to score as many discs into their goals as they can during a two (2)-minute and fifteen (15)-second match. The higher the goal in which the disc is scored, the more points the Alliance receives” -FIRST Website. We are looking forward to the competition this year as we start to build our 2013 robot. The complete rules for this year’s challenge can be found at http://frc-manual.usfirst.org/viewItem/3. We hope to see fellow teams and supporters at our first competition, the Lonestar Regional.