US FIRST Team #3392, Grand Prairie, TX
The photo album has been updated with ALL of the pictures that were taken between 2009-2012.
NOTE: These images are copyright ©2008-2012 Ricardo Villegas or Khoa K Tran for US FIRST Team #3392. All rights reserved.
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No, not an April Fool’s joke. 
Our team has definitely concluded that Bag&Tag is not for us.
Though I did find ridiculous that the robot had to be shipped to Irving before it went to Dallas (last year). The robot travels more than us on the way to the Regional!
We had to make a tough call on Day 1: should we bring the robot, or the rest of our team? This is because the rental van our mentor borrowed had room for 15 people; we needed to get rid of the 3rd and 4th row to fit our robot & tools, supplies etc. The Dallas East Regional had a 12-member limit to each team this year. (The rest of the team can cheer in the stands @ the Dallas Memorial Arena.) Now it seems better to us to actually ship the robot instead, so we can bring the ___whole___ team along with us at the same time.
We also did a (quite funny) “What if”:
If we had taken the rest of the team with us, how would we disguise the finance team as a robot AND pass inspection? 
It is quite rude to enquire about their weights (Never ask a girl about her weight. She will kill you. )
And only Duyen might be able to pass height inspection, as she is just shy of 5′.
-R
Our 2012 record is as follows: 5-5-1. Finished 27th out of 43 in the East division, 27 of 82 overall.
Yet it seems quite serendipitous that we even got to .500.
Now it’s off to the drugstore to develop some film.
In other news, we are planning on changing our nickname. Up for public discussion: Steel Tigers or Tigeroids?
We’ll see………And now, a small video:
It takes us THIS long to change bumpers. And then we realised that we need only cover the corners of the robot.
-R
2-4-1, missed 2, of those, lost 1.
If we are going to at least get over .500, we need to win ALL of our remaining matches. There is a ~0.0001% chance of actually getting seeded for the group of 8 alliances tomorrow.
In other news, the Plexiglas® broke TWICE. On the second breach, we had to get it replaced with a thicker Lexan® sheet, which did NOT fit the robot almost as well as we wanted to.
As of now, the off-season is just about to start (for us), so we might as well start talking about sponsorship opportunities. And a way to pay back the loan Harmony Public Schools gave us at the beginning of the season.
EDIT: We are SEVERELY underfunded. In fact, the problem is such that we now need to schedule and organise an emergency meeting with ALL members of the team to take steps in resolving the issue.
After our last match today, everyone thought it a good idea to leave immediately afterward. Meanwhile, I was at the bathroom. And got lost on the way. By the time I righted myself, everyone had left the Dallas Memorial Arena and were halfway back to the school. Almost the same thing happened with Muhammad yesterday, but we caught ourselves just in time.
That’s all for now. I am SO. WIPED. OUT. from today. But I’ll try to push myself to the drugstore to get the film developed and scanned for publishing to the website. Hey, at least C-41 processing+CD (no prints) is $7.99.
-R
Well, it was quite a day. We went through most of the day building the robot assuming that w/o the bumpers, that it would fit the size constraints of 38″ long.
It didn’t.
It was 1830 hours at the time of inspection — less than two hours remaining to fix the problem.
We stood there for ~30 minutes arguing over how to fix the problem, and then decided to call on HSA-Austin to help us cut the frame down to size.
Re-inspection took place ~1940 hrs. The robot finally fit the test frame. The only thing that needs to be done for tomorrow is to install red/blue bumpers and attach the offense module. And reinspect.
We are writing autonomous code this year, nothing fancy, move forward, launch balls from that position.
We’ll see how that goes, tomorrow.
This picture pretty much sums it all up:
-R
