Hi there VEX Forum. I’m excited to announce the launch of VRC Team# 8899 and Manatee County Robotics Club. We’re very excited to be competing and are looking forward to an excellent season! This thread will be used primarily for team status updates and competition results. We’re hoping to really prove ourselves this year and hopefully attend the World Championships next April. This will be our first (and last) year competing under team# 8899, so we’re hoping to make it a great one. See you folks in competition! We begin our build next week.
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Who else thinks this was on purpose?
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I assure you, completely accidental. Thanks for pointing it out though. 
Don’t worry, I haven’t made nearly as many intergalactic puns as I should have during the months I’ve spent on this forum.
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As of today, we are officially signed up for the Central Florida Skyrise Qualifier, held at Carver Middle School in Leesburg, Florida. The event will be held on 11/8/2014. It’s always been a great event to go to in years’ past, and we’re certainly looking forward to attending again this year!
Our robot’s construction is nearing it’s final stages as we get ready for testing and analysis, teleop practice, and programming our robot’s various autonomous routines. We look forward to the upcoming weeks, as they’re sure to be filled with excitement! 
Hey folks! It’s been a while since we’ve updated this thread (and also since I’ve been active on the forums) so here’s an update on how Tesla Robotics has been doing.
So, after we built our robot, we had to rethink a lot of things in order to get ready for the tournament in Leesburg. There were a lot of features we tested out, and a lot of new things we tried, but through our experiences we found that not all of them were as effective as we hoped. Regardless, we were able to get in plenty of practice time with our robot and we competed at Leesburg over the weekend. We may not have won the tournament, but we certainly learned a lot, made plenty of new friends, and had a lot of fun competing! We also won the build award as well. We’d also like to thank our alliance partners 1360B and 508B.
Our next competition is in January, and we plan to completely redesign our robot, taking into account all of the knowledge we’ve collected thus far. Since we’re going to be using a completely different design for the next event we go to, we hope to release a reveal of our first robot design sometime soon, along with an analysis of what worked/didn’t work. The main thing we need to improve upon is lift stability and overall speed/efficiency, but I’ll touch upon that more in the reveal. Stay tuned!
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So, we competed today at the War at Woodland event, in North Port, FL. We won the Design Award and are now qualified for the State Championship in Florida! Apparently the judges really liked our interview and notebook, and we could have even been in the running for excellence if our skills scores were better, but overall I am very pleased with how the event went down.
Overall it was a very fun and informative event. Our new robot design was a lot more efficient than TCB 1.0, but as a tradeoff, we didn’t have enough time to get in more driving practice, which would have benefitted us greatly today. We ended up 5-2 and ranked 7th out of 24, and got knocked out in Quarterfinals, but we learned a lot from this competition. We are happy to be qualified for State Championships and are really excited for our next two competitions at Lakewood Ranch and Brandon. We plan to refine our autonomous routines and get in a lot more driving practice over the course of the next few weeks.
Also, I got to take a picture with these fine unicorn fellows from TERRA Environmental Research Institute (4411), so that was cool!
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Congrats on the design award. See you at states!
These past few tournaments we went to were an absolute blast!
At the competition in Lakewood Ranch, although we won no awards, we had a lot of fun competing alongside everyone and we had a pretty epic showdown in the semifinals, although we ultimately lost. We ended up 4:1 in terms of win loss.
At the Battle in Brandon, things got off to a bit of a rocky start, both with the tournament and with our own robot, but we eventually pulled through and made it to the semifinals once more. Once again, we had a fantastic series of matches against 5956A (Bangarang) and were one skyrise away from bringing the last match into a tie. We ended up winning the Design Award once more, which now double-qualifies us for state championship! I also want to congratulate 1360 and 1360B for qualifying for States, 5956A and 5956B for a well fought series of matches, and 2049R and 5433B for being great alliance partners!
We were able to thoroughly evaluate what we need to improve upon with our current design, and given that we have three weeks until the State Championship, we’re planning on focusing on programming skills and making very minor adjustments to our robot. State Championship will probably be one of the hardest obstacles for us to overcome, given that there are only 9 World Championship slots out of a 60 team capacity, but I’m confident that we can do it!
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WE’RE GOING TO WORLDS!
Not only did we win Design Award for the third time this season, but we also won Robot Skills Champion by achieving the highest score in the state of Florida, 40 points!
State Championship was one heck of an event. The Sundome was a lot of fun to compete in, and it was great seeing all of the teams who made it this far. Congratulations to all of the other teams who qualified at the State Championship yesterday!
I will likely put together a reveal of our current robot design soon, so keep an eye out!
See you at Worlds!
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Congrats on the Design Award and 40 points in robot skills. Sincerely former 1st place for florida. Lol but seriously, you guys are a great team, it was fun to compete against you and everyone else at the Sundome.
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Congrats to you guys as well on winning Tournament Champions! You folks have one of the most interesting, different, and effective robot designs we’ve seen for this game! Look forward to seeing you at Worlds.
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Thanks! Same to you as well.
Kyle, Heng, Victoria, good job.
8899 is one of the most dedicated teams I have interacted with. They prove that most of the times, three or four really hardworking members are enough to make things work smoothly. Still, I would say that a three people team doing a major redesign/rebuild, awesome engineering notebook, great team website, superb skills record and completing online challenge is an outstanding achievement. Great one season you guys had.
Hope we have what it takes to make world competition next week. Good luck!
Martin, 3921B
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Martin, your kind words mean so much to us! Thank you!
I have complete confidence that you and your team have what it takes to secure a spot for Worlds as well, and we look forward to seeing you there! You can do anything you set your mind to, you just need to remember to never give up!
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Kyle, you have taught me that PROS = instawin.
In all seriousness your team is amazing. I never doubted you guys. Congratulations on getting to Worlds!
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Thanks so much! I know you guys will be able to get there next time. Just gotta keep working at it!
As a side note, we uploaded several of our match videos from FL States which can be found on our youtube channel! This shows our robot in match play so teams can get an idea of what we were competing with at States. A more in-depth reveal of our State Championship robot will be on the way soon!
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