Join the Manchester Machine Makers at the Manchester Community Library on May 31, 1:00pm – 3:30pm for a Robotics Show & Share event!
Manchester Machine Makers (MMM), a 4-H sponsored FIRST® Tech Challenge team, is hosting a Robotics Meet-And-Greet for (Southern) Vermont at the Manchester Community Library. We will set up stations to teach people with all different levels of experience about the different aspects of robotics, including hardware (Building the robot) and software (Coding the robot). With a couple of basic robots, we can drive around the room.
Near the end of the event, people can share what they accomplished during the day and receive duckies for participating at a station. There will also be special ducks to earn, so give the day your all and have fun!
1:00 – 1:15 → Introducing the team
1:15 – 1:30 → Introducing the stations
1:30 – 2:45 → Stations
2:45 – 3:30 → Share achievements and receive duckies
As a 4-H club, MMM is open to all students grades 7-12 (ages 12-18) in the local area who are interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) and/or robotics. MMM invites anybody interested in STEAM to join us for the Show & Share and learn more about what is being done to promote STEAM education in our community. Join us as we explore the future.
We hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving, enjoying many good things. We certainly did! The Green Mountain Girls will be supporting us again this year; I encourage you to also support them as a great non-profit organization that helps fundraise for other local non-profit groups (including us, yay!)
The Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering has also provided us a grant to further outreach to the Greater Manchester community, with which we plan to design a robot “kit” to give hands-on experience during limited-time, casual workshops. After we finish building our competition robots, Cordelia and Cornelius and Thomas, we will use that experience along with the grant to put together some open house opportunities.
We have also been the beneficiary of several private donors – you know who you are, and thank you so very much!
All donations go 100% toward supporting our FIRST Tech Challenge program. All mentors and coaches are volunteers, and as we charge no membership fees, all of our funding comes from grants and donations.
This Giving Tuesday, please consider donating to the future of humankind. We are a club that teaches the next generation of innovators how to build robots and work with the technology of tomorrow, building robots out of repurposed Android devices. Help us shape the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries – donate to your local robotics club, the Manchester Machine Makers, today with PayPal here.
Good News! The robot is almost completed. The team is currently focusing on finishing the programming and polishing the pulley system. The team is still undecided on a name for the robot so far, but we are very hopeful for another great name. We can’t wait for the competition in February!
Some great news for our supporters as we begin the season of gratitude: the Manchester Machine Makers was recently the grateful recipient of a grant from the Green Mountain Girls, a local organization with a heart of gold!
The Green Mountain Girls is a volunteer organization that supports all the local charities in the area. We are incredibly honored to have their support – and we hope that we earn it by the work that we do to provide STEAM activities to inspire our teenagers (or at least to keep these all-too-bright kids out of trouble)!
If you’re looking for a group to donate to in order to round out your fiscal year, of course I’d say give it to us first; but perhaps I’m a bit biased. The Green Mountain Girls come in a pretty close second, though!
We’ve had a nice summer break and are beginning to get ready to dive in once again to the world of cooperative and competitive robotics! The 2023-2024 challenge will be released on Saturday, September 9th. We’ll begin brainstorming immediately!
This year’s challenge will bring the Arts into play – no longer STEM, but STEAM. How exactly, we’ll find out on the 9th; but we have a few clues from the revised Game Manual 1: we’ll need to make a team-customized game element or two, and this year they’re introducing AprilTags into the game.
Sounds fun, right? I bet you’re thinking, “gosh, I’d like to do that too! I wonder, when do they meet?” Luckily, I have an answer for you: Saturdays, starting September 9th, at our HQ in the Smith Center basement at Burr & Burton Academy. We will meet on 9/9 at 11am-2pm, but more usually we’ll meet from 9am-12pm. And, we’re always ready to welcome new members!
FIRST and Qualcomm present the 2023-2024 Robotics Season, FIRST IN SHOW.
Contact us for more info, and keep an eye on this website if you’re interested in what we’re doing.
What a day! We brought Ahnold up to CVU for the Vermont FTC Championship tournament on February 11, 2023. The team started out before dawn in order to arrive in time to present to the judges in the very first slot at 7:30am.
Then it was on to the robot inspection, where the officials made sure that everything about our robot and game elements was legal. Turns out we’d made a mistake on the size of our custom element, so they clarified that for us and we were able to adjust our ducky rings to suit before our first match.
There were two practice fields laid out for teams to use as needed, which gave plenty of room for everyone to test functionality and work on driving skills. We made sure that our autonomous worked well, and that our drive team knew where to place the robot on the field, and practiced retrieving cones and scoring them. Since we don’t have a full field set up at our workshop, we’d only had the chance to explore the real space of the field once before, with the Cookie Clickers in Bennington.
Coaches meeting, drivers’ meeting; our drivers were Takoda and Isaac, and Carter was the drive coach. Zach was our team’s “human player”, having studied the rules so that he was prepared to set out cones and scoring elements correctly and promptly. The schedule was devised, and the matches began!
The opening ceremony featured a young woman from Afghanistan’s all-female FTC team, who had escaped and were now scattered around the world where they could continue studying engineering. She lives now in the Brattleboro area and is attending college in nearby Massachusetts.
Ahnold worked beautifully! Our autonomous routine was absolutely consistent throughout the qualifying rounds; and our drivers were able to score cones reliably, worked with our alliance partners to create circuits, capped with our custom element, and even managed to park in the right place by the end of the matches.
Between the matches, judges and other volunteers came around to see how all the teams were doing. The atmosphere was one of friendly competition, and we went around and admired other robots, loaned equipment if needed, and generally enjoyed the community. We got some great ideas from the Robohawks for a drivers’ station console, too!
We came into the competition hoping to be in the top 10 out of 19 teams. As the matches went on, we were consistently above that measure! We began to hope.
At the end of the qualifying rounds, not only had we achieved a top 10 ranking, we were fourth overall, and that gave us a sure spot as an Alliance Captain in the semi-finals!
We had enjoyed a very successful round with Mansfield Mechanics United early in the day, and so we were pleased when they accepted our invitation to be our partners. Visions of Nationals danced in our heads…
Unfortunately, our last qualifying round had involved a collision with the arena wall that misaligned something, or perhaps broke it. One of the wheels wasn’t working correctly. Although our medic gave the wheel assembly a thorough check and verified that it was turning easily and correctly, Ahnold limped through the semi-final matches and was not able to advance to the final rounds.
We cheered on the CVU Redhawks, the CVU Robohawks, Hive Mind and Bubbert Innovations as they played out three full rounds of the finals for an edge-of-the-seat finish!
Vermont will be sending both CVU teams to Nationals to represent our state. However, our day didn’t end there!
Awards
The Manchester Machine Makers succeeded beyond our wildest dreams on the field last Saturday. We also were recognized as a team and individually for our achievements:
Isaac Vernon was chosen (once again!) as a Finalist for the Dean’s List Award, which will be selected and announced at Nationals. The team sure did nominate him for a reason! We’re proud of you and glad to have you as our team’s Captain.
The Manchester Machine Makers was recognized in third place for the Innovate Award. From the FTC Award Descriptions information sheet:
The Innovate Award celebrates a team that thinks imaginatively and has the ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to make their designs come to life. This judged award is given to the team that has an innovative and creative robot design solution to any specific components in the FIRST Tech Challenge game. Elements of this award include elegant design, robustness, and ‘out of the box’ thinking related to design.
More importantly, the team earned first place out of all Vermont teams for the Control Award, recognizing our programming for both driver-assist functions and for the most consistent Autonomous Period performance of any team that day, with a solid 20 points per round!
The Control Award celebrates a team that uses sensors and software to increase the robot’s functionality in the field. This award is given to the team that demonstrates innovative thinking to solve game challenges such as autonomous operation, improving mechanical systems with intelligent control, or using sensors to achieve better results. The control component should work consistently in the field.
Engineered Printing Solutions for their generosity of funding and support of our members with their time, ideas, and opportunities;
Burr and Burton Academy for allowing our team to use its space for storage and meetings;
Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering for their Hands-On Science and Technology Grant, giving us the opportunity to experiment our way to success;
And a huge thank-you to all of our donors, friends, family, community members, FIRST volunteers, and fellow FTC Teams for supporting us in our quest to become engineers!
Ahnold will be at BBA along with our Engineering Portfolio while we enjoy our February break and then have some more fun with robotics this spring.
We’re on our way! We’ve polished up our portfolio, practiced our presentation, and now we just need to pack everything into the car tomorrow for the early morning drive up to Hinesburg, VT.
We encourage all our friends and supporters to stop by and cheer for all the Vermont FTC teams.*
On November 20, 2022, we had a great combined meeting with the Cookie Clickers from nearby Bennington. We each introduced our robots, discussed our design decisions, built, drove, and played.
We showed off our two-pronged approach: we have, at this point, built two mostly-complete robots. One uses a jointed arm as the collection and delivery mechanism, and one uses a slide lift to accomplish the same purpose. A big thank-you to the Vermont Academy for Science and Engineering for support in this endeavor!
We compared our claw designs; we have basically settled on some kind of pincer for handling the cones, but haven’t yet settled on a final design. We were able to show the progress we’ve made on our various prototypes, and the Cookie Clickers likewise showed off their manipulator and how it works.
Although our team’s space doesn’t allow for a full field, we had our mats set out with a few junctions so that we could drive around — mostly for fun, because who doesn’t like making a robot go?
Our teams then split in two, so that we could make alliances between us. We had a large paper gameboard of Power Play, designed and shared by team 12611 (Paper version: https://bit.ly/ftcboardgame 3D version: https://bit.ly/cadmodel) and had our alliances claim junctions to understand some of the game’s strategy.
We all had a great time! Flash forward to January 29th, 2023, when we joined them at their space on Main Street in Bennington.
The Manchester Machine Makers, hosted by the Cookie Clickers in Bennington, Vermont
Each team presented robots, in preparation for the Judges’ presentation at the upcoming Vermont State Championship competition on Feb. 11, at CVU in Hinesburg. While neither robot was completely finished, it was great to see them both actually on the field!
We are looking forward to joining the Cookie Clickers again at the competition!
I had a great experience working at EPS in the engineering department this summer!
I worked as a mechanical engineering intern, and worked with a team of practiced engineers to design printers for a variety of customers and applications. This internship gave me a much better understanding of how the industry works, and helped me refine my own engineering skills, especially in computer aided design!
I went through one project, a fixture for holding parts steady while they were printed on, from beginning to finish, which provided a better overall sense of how the different departments in the company meshed along with their respective role in creating a final product.
Overall, it was a very beneficial experience for me, and I would be happy to do something similar in the future!
FTC 16221 Manchester Machine Makers 