Hello VEX Forum!
Oh its been a long time since I have been able to sit down and actually write something like this. A lot has happened, both good and bad.
I guess I’ll start at the beginning.
Last year before the world championship we were very active with designs and publically posted threads here on the forum. We decided to compete in VEX Gateway. We had an insanely quick jump into the game and designed a few robots and as you know released the concept of Hand Of God. The Hand of God was designed, however never made it into full production along with any of our other robots. One reason was to blame.
Funding.
As much as we loved VEX and the game, you can’t do a lot with no money. There were a few things that we were going to do in order to build our bots but they quickly fell through into nothing. Its not that we were “lazy” or not dedicated, we simply couldn’t find any money. Wherever we went they simply said that they would not sponsor a College Organization. Not even the two Colleges we operate out of, They told us “they were simple to involved in FIRST and other forms of robotics competitions that they could not invest into our team or functions.” We still tried, we got one largish financial sponsor.
International Fluid Power Society. They generously gave us 500 dollars. However they were the only sponsor that came through. As some of us know, 500 dollars is very little to run a successful robotics team with. As that pretty much bought just the motors.
As we realized that Aperture was slowly losing hope we all focused primarily on other things like school, work, mentoring HS VEX teams. We still remained active as a team just we knew we couldn’t get the bots done for worlds.
Whats going to happen?
Aperture does want to compete this year as this game looks amazing. And we can apply concepts from HOG very easily into this game just super scaled a bit more… (teaser)
What are we doing to prevent what happened last year?
Well we have lined up a possible sponsor who is very generous and will help us with pretty much anything. The idea is to build two very well thought out robots with stuff that VEX has never seen before (Hopefully but pretty sure).
As for release of HOG. It going to be a bit while longer. Sorry guys 
We will be making a HOG 2.0 for the worlds next year. Bigger, Better, Faster. But it will simply function as a camera rig, unless we decided to make it pick and place sacks which is always an option. We also will be using more plastic than allowed in the College Level for HOG 2.0 since we want the robot to simply be the best that it can be. We figured its not going to hurt much, since its going to be a show piece anyway why not? Another thing for HOG 2.0 We will be designing for a 24 inch cube instead of a 18 inch cube.
Questions are appreciated.
I hope to have more info on our participation soon.
- Andrew