Haverford Robotics Club

Club logo

The Haverford Robotics Club is the club where the students of Haverford High School, build various types of robots. I was on the team in 10th Grade and the first half of 11th Grade.

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. In 11th Grade, I ran the website for the club, team484.org.

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 Our luck 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

Team 484 did a bit better at Philadelphia regional 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 and we scored a lot of points. From what I heard we did fairly well in the seeding rounds and were picked by Lower Marion, the 3rd seeded alliance. However we lost in the first round of the finals due in large part to our alliance partners not sticking to the agreed upon strategy. I heard that throughout the competition we were dependable and reliable. We did exactly what we said we would and followed alliance strategies. However, by standing, and our own performance, Philadelphia still went better then Annapolis.

Monty Madness

Monty Madness was an informal competition on May 20, 2007 at Montgomery Township High School in New Jersey. We did very well here, and were ranked #1 after matches 15-21. Our luck turned and we ended up ranked #8 with 3 wins, 2 ties, and a loss. That meant we were an alliance captain going into the finals. We teamed up with teams 11 and 1089. Being the 8th alliance, we had to face the #1 alliance. At first it was easy, we decimated the #1 ranked alliance (teams 869, 1403, and 2070) 140 to 23. I believe this was the highest score of the competition. But then they got serious. They played very hard defense and we lost to them 12 to 34 and 19 to 39. It was a fun competition never the less.

Fall 2007

We went back to the Ramp Riot Competition in Wissahickon again on 11/10/2007. We didn't do so well. We came in 35 out of 36. Ouch. I wasn't too involved with the robot this time. I helped scout (so we could pick teams if we were in the top 8), showed the freshmen around, and hung out with my friends. I was told that the robot's driving didn't really work, and that we had some inexperienced drivers at the controls. The Philly Phanatic even showed up, and I got some good pictures of him. Afterwards the sponsors treated the team to ice cream. Ramp Riot 2007 Pictures This whole competition, Rack 'n Roll was an off year for us. Hopefully we do better in the next game announced in January 2008.

Leaving Team

I quit the team before that 2008 contest. I continued to maintain the website for the rest of the year. As of August 2008, I did not have anything to do with the team. I think they reverted the website to an old version.