Newsletter by Carly Hart, Maxwell Richards, and Henry Tuohy.

Without a doubt, Spartronics has been hard at work preparing for competitions for the past few weeks. Our first competitive event of the season was this last weekend at Glacier Peak High School in Snohomish, where we went up against teams from all over the Pacific Northwest.

Spartronics finished ranked 6th out of the 34 competing teams, was the 5th Alliance Captain, and went all the way to the semifinals – being eliminated just one match away from being one of the two Alliances who competed in the finals. TALOS, our newest robot, excelled at balancing on the Charge Station, scoring in autonomous mode, and scoring game cubes.See videos of all the Glacier Peak matches here.

A list of our Glacier Peak matches are here.

NEXT UP: Our 2nd competition and final regular matches of this season at Auburn High School on Saturday and Sunday, April 1 and 2.

If we qualify, we will move on to the District Championships at Eastern Washington near Spokane for matches on Thursday, April 6 through Saturday, April 8. Watch our website for more details or follow us on Social Media at the links near the bottom of this newsletter.

Though we wouldn’t have succeeded without the combined effort of all our students and mentors, the Drive Team did excellently throughout all our matches, and their skillfulness was crucial to our performance as a team.

We are incredibly proud of the team captains: Zephyr, Megan, Zack, Maxine, Everett, and Carter, who all demonstrated exemplary leadership leading up to and during the Glacier Peak event.

We will now focus our efforts on improving the design of our robot and enhancing our strategy for our next competition in Auburn, with pit setup on March 31st and matches on April 1 and April 2nd.

More Info on TALOS:

TALOS stands for Telescopic, Actuated Lifter On Swerve, and is named after the Greek mythological figure Talos, a giant bronze automaton built by Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing and craftsmanship. Talos is regarded as the first depiction of a robot in human art and literature.

Notable features of TALOS include:
    • Full node extension (i.e. can reach all payloads with its arm)
    • Gyroscopic balance
    • Double station and ground pickup
    • Swerve drive chassis
    • Low center of gravity
    • Weighted for improved balance