The first question you always get is,
is it Battlebots?
And it's not Battlebots.
Three months ago, six months ago,
we had no idea what would be going on this season.
If we would even be able to compete.
If we would have students that could participate.
You know, there was a lot of what ifs.
My name is Patrick McGuire,
and I am one of the lead design students for FRC 125.
FRC 125 is a FIRST Robotics competition team.
Every year we get a challenge and in six weeks
we build a robot to compete with for this challenge.
The games are generally sports themed.
You know, throwing a ball into a goal.
Unleashing and unloading again
is 125, the Nutrons, into that high efficiency boiler!
Holy smokes, look at 'em go!
Prior to this year, we've qualified every year since 2011.
And usually it's not a big stressor for us.
We just know we're going to make it,
because we do well enough that we always do.
This year, it's a lot harder.
This year is the only year we're a little worried about qualifying.
The way it works is that everybody is required to go to two district events.
The points that you accumulate for those two district events
set your ranking within the district.
The top 16 teams in the district
get an automatic buy to World's.
There's still three more weeks of competitions
where other teams can leapfrog us and get ahead of us.
We need to keep pushing ourselves.
We need to get better.
And we need to do that this weekend.
So the challenge is to shoot these balls into that goal.
So there's both red and blue balls, depending on
which side of the field you're on.
You got to shoot in one color or the other.
And then at the end of the match,
we've got to lift ourself up on those rungs.
We have a pretty unique system to do that.
This robot's called FreeFall.
It's a little ironic because
it can actually be in freefall for a second during the climb process.
Most teams will go from one bar, to the next bar, to the third bar.
We skip the middle bar.
We are currently one of the fastest,
if not the fastest in the world at this.
The Markforged parts specifically really helped us here
because we're using the Continuous Carbon Fiber in them.
There's no one in FRC right now
that's 3D printing their climber assembly for this year's challenge.
People will see that.
They'll learn from that.
People know that we've done that because we're proud of that aspect.
The Markforged material, it's allowing us
to make stuff that we didn't even think we could before.
This year is really important to me
because having done this for eight years, it's almost half my life,
and this is my last year I get to do this as a student.
I also missed out on the last two years because of COVID.
So I really want this year to be special and to be like,
go out with a bang.
There's a couple of really hard things to figure out.
I know exactly what holds us back, and it's just that we don't have space.
A lot of teams that we strive to be like
and compare ourselves to have facilities where they can set up a field
that represents a full playing field
and practice every day with their robot, make improvements.
Our team has never had access to space like that.
It's really hard in the Boston area.
We financially can't go off and rent our own space.
It's just not viable for us.
So that's the thing that holds us back.
That's why we're late bloomers, because once we get the robot on the field,
there's usually a few things
that show up that we have to shake out that we just weren't able to.
Wait, we're dead, wait.
30 seconds, 30 seconds, 30!
We're, we're dead.
Alliance one has taken a field time out that began 30 seconds ago,
so we will resume gameplay, final two, in 5 minutes and 30 seconds.
We don't have to reset climber.
Yeah, can I take this real quick? We have battery.
Do we have... ?
We need help on this side!
We need gaff tape.
No.
How?
Nathan, get gaff.
It's the Nutrons!
We really want to win.
Because it's our home turf.