Barn Owl was our robot from 2011 that made it all the way to the national championships. It was a robot designed to place inner tubes on pegs on the wall. During competitions, we ended up placing inner tubes extremely successfully during autonomous and played stellar defense.
Orange Christmas was our 2012 robot. The object of the 2012 game was to shoot basketballs into hoops at various heights. Orange Christmas performed well in competition.
Chronos, our 2013 robot, had one of the most advanced game piece storage mechanisms we had ever built. It's goal was to shoot frisbees into holes and prevent other robots from doing so. Our robot played tight defense extremely successfully as well as getting in a few shots.
In 2014, the year of PGV, the team lost over half it's members. This was our first robot built follow this huge loss. Regardless, it performed far better than we predicted and prevented some of the best teams from even shooting.
Napoleon is our award winning 2015 robot. We won Capital City Classic with this robot and the Silicon Valley Regional Creativity Award.
Castle Crasher is our 2016 robot for the competition FIRST Stronghold. This robot got the highest rank yet for our team earning 8th place in qualiying matches at Calgames.
Seam Bot Willie is our robot for the 2017 competition FIRST Steamworks. This is our highest scoring robot to date. With it, we got 3rd place at Silicon Valley Regional and were the 1st pick of the 1st seated alliance for the finals.
We are a robotics team located in Portola Valley. We compete in the FIRST Robotics competition (FRC). We are affiliated with Woodside Priory School and work out of a old barn from the mid-20th century. Every year, we build a robot to compete against other robots in a challenge. Each year, there is a different challenge. We also do a number of off-season projects (namely our open-source projects) that benefit ourselves as well as the FIRST community as a whole.
The team was founded in 2002 by a group of Woodside Priory Students. The name "Barn2Robotics" comes from our lab's location, a small corner of the second (of 3) barns. We have competed in the First Robotics Competition almost every year, except for a short hiatus and 1 year when we didn't have the funds to attend. The program has gone from around 5 students to now almost 40.
Barn2Robotics is partially funded by Woodside Priory; however, this doesn't cover all of our expenses. The way we pay for everything else is through our wonderful sponsors. Some donate products, some discounts, some volunteers, and some provide us with monetary donations. These sponsors are really the only way our team can exist. If you are interested in learning more about the team or sponsoring it, contact team751@gmail.com.
We love volunteers and sponsors (and mentors). If you are interested in volunteering or sponsoring us, contact team751@gmail.com.
BarnOwl is our teams lab management software. It runs on AWS and manages all of the parts in our lab, as well as the shopping list and student attendance. It integrates with the fingerprints readers in our lab to keep track of how much time people spend in the lab. BarnOwl also allows us to search for parts and see a visual representation of what drawer they are in.
Tractor is our autonomous route designer (work in progress). It allows teams to design a route on an iPad and then attach it to a robot over an aux connection. It then can send waypoints to the robot for it to follow during autonomous mode.
Irrigation is what we like to call a distributed sensor network. It allows for a "sprinkler" to be plugged into a Cat5 jack anywhere on the robot. Each "sprinkler" has a sensor as well as a micro-controller on it. It allows us to quickly add and replace sensors on the robot as well as have smart-sensors. An example of a smart sensor is a "sprinkler" where a temperature sensor and a fan are attached and the fan automatically turns on when the temperature gets too hot.
Plow is our on-board status monitor system. While our robot is in the pits at competitions, we are able to attach a small monitor to it which reads out diagnostic data about our robot. We can observe if motor controllers are disconnected, the heat of our motors and their controllers, and many other things as well.