Haverford Robotics Club

Club logo

The Haverford Robotics Club is the club where the students of Haverford High School, including Plaz build various types of robots.

Currently, the club is known as Team 484, and has many people in it. Led by Mr. Benjamin Preddy, the team has gone to several competitions such as the Wissahickon and Drexel championships, and has won prestigious awards such as the Rookie Award, and two silver medals. It competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Fall 2006

My rookie season in the club in 10th Grade. I took rookie classes and fixed up last year's robot, the "Blue Light Special", for the Ramp Riot Competition in Wissahickon. We won that by being randomly selected the substitute team for what happened to be the winning alliance. We had won outright in the previous 3 years, so other teams we a bit mad we still managed to win. We actually wanted to go home earlier in the day, but decided to stay. So it was quite a sight, the robot was packed up after we disappointed in qualifiers. Still it was a great feeling to "win". Some video of Ramp Riot 2006

Spring 2007

The game this year is "Rack n' Roll", announced at the 2007 Kickoff. This was my first build period, which lasts 6 weeks, and the club met 6 days a week, 6:30 to 9 PM each day in our shop. I worked on the sensors, a bit of the programming, and a bit of mechanical, and on the electrics. Mostly I just floated around learning as much as I could, helping where I can. The robot is called ROW-bot as in a rowboat. We are dressed like vikings.

Photos of the build time and our robot for Haverford High School students on Facebook

Annapolis Regional

Photos from Annapolis 2007 on Facebook Team 484 traveled to Annapolis, Maryland to compete in the 2007 Chesapeake Regional at the US Naval Academy. The robot, ROW-bot, came in 26th out of ~55 in the qualifying matches. We did very well in the first match scoring over 100 points. That must have set off a flag for other teams because we were blocked after that. The announcer said, "Team 484, making it look easy".

Also the robot broke in many matches. We switched to a new arm design halfway through the competition. The air system didn't work for two matches. And we stripped out all of the wiring and redid it one night. But now we have the bugs worked out.

We were not picked by any teams to be in the finals but were ranking 9th of the teams not in the finals. One team dropped out of the "bullpen", and we were in the finals. If 8 robots broke down ahead of us, we could play in the finals. That didn't happen, but "officially" we were in the finals.

Team 75 was one of the winners. They did very well and had a very neat arm.

This was not as well as we would have liked to have done, and have done in years passed. However, theres still the Drexel competition which is an independent shot at the prize.

Philadelphia Regional

The Philadelphia regional is ongoing now at Drexel University. I was only there for the set up and practice day, but we did very well that day. We were the first to be inspected and all practices went very well. Hopefully we will win without my help.