Funky Shiitake Mushrooms

Designing

Part of our VEX frame

During the month of August, the Funky Shiitake Mushrooms met often to complete a number of goals. However, not all of the team members were present throughout the month. Eric was gone for three weeks to work for Stratum Energy Systems in Ohio. Catherine, having finished her work with the Oakland Children’s Hospital, is taking a week off to spend time with her family in Alaska before school starts.

We decided to enter the Digital Open, an online technological competition for youths. Additionally, we began building our robot for Vex Robotics Competition. Today, we’re refining and restoring the blimp to flying condition. Raymond is working on the speed controllers, Eric cleaned up the wiring, while David and I ran around for materials (such as helium). Eric and David are reattaching the blimps to the frame as I type.

Oh snap, did we burn out a battery?

At other meetings, we typed up our project report for the Digital Open, which can be found here: http://digitalopen.org/projects/hybrid-airship. Also, Catherine, Raymond, David and I finished building the frame of our robot which will be entered into the VRC in late October. Hopefully we’ll be able to finish the internal workings soon. Eric, who has been in Ohio for the last three weeks, has stayed in contact with the rest of the team and was researching the logistics of patenting our dual-blimp design.

School begins for us in less than two weeks. As seniors, we’re all taking challenging classes, applying for college, and juggling other extra-curricular activities on top of working as the Funky Shiitake Mushrooms. However, I have full confidence that we’ll be able to succeed this year, just as we have in the years before.

Robogames competition warehouse

Catherine was off on vacation, David had a graduation to attend to in the morning, so that left Raymond, Eric and I to take the blimp and all of our stuff to San Francisco. We woke up super early — about 6:30am — and made it there around 8am (we got a little lost). The warehouse Robogames was hosted in was on a huge dock on the Bay. We were puzzled when we got there. No one was around and all the doors were locked. A couple of other people were standing outside so we asked them what was going on. Turns out we had arrived about an hour early….

Raymond, Eric and I decided to take this time to explore the surrounding area. We walked along the beach and came to a pier overlooking the bay. We were pretty surprised to see people actually swimming in the bay so early in the morning. Just as we were leaving, a group of five or six people wearing swimsuits showed up and informed us they were going to dive off the pier into the ocean. That’s right. You read that correctly.

Eric and Raymond immediately took this as a photo shoot moment and began snapping pictures like mad. I admit I was a little skeptical about these people diving off such a high pier into the middle of the bay at such an early hour with such low temperatures. But they did.

Since it was about time for the doors to open, we decided to head back. We were glad to see that the ceilings were pretty high, meaning that Eric and I would have plenty of flying space. We immediately registered and claimed one of the empty tables. Then Eric and Raymond got started on setting up the airship, making sure the electronics were functioning and filling the blimps with helium. I set up the laptop and ran the presentation on it explaining who we are and what we do, and also put out the fliers that also had information about us.

In less than two hours, we were set to fly. By the time the blimp had reached the ceiling there was a crowd gathered around us. Eric and I circled it around the warehouse a couple of times, even trying to maneuver around the rafters (which was a bad idea, we almost got stuck). Then, we decided to see how long it would take us to fly the perimeter of the warehouse with Raymond timing us. It took us less than three minutes.

Our blimp flying around in Robogames. Photo credits to Bob Burbach

Thrilled, we decided to clean up our work area and to turn it into sort of a display. We balanced the lightweight airship on a tripod and stacked our tackle boxes full of supplies underneath it. On the other edge of the table we positioned our promotional materials. Then we cleaned off any stray trash and put away the rest of our supplies under the table.

Then began the waiting.

Best-in-show wasn’t to be judged until later in the afternoon. Raymond and I had other things to take care of back in Fremont, so we took off first. Eric stayed at the warehouse, where David accompanied him later.

At about 2pm, we were judged. Raymond and I called in to check what had happened. We won second place!

By about 5pm, all of the stuff was out of the warehouse and back at Eric’s house. David has the medallion, which has LED lights so that it looks pretty. Eric still has my laptop.

All in all, not bad for a day’s work. Not bad at all.

Photo courtesy of the San Jose Tech Museum

We went to Tech Challenge with a fully functional airship, that had gone through two full cycles of testing, and with drivers with a few days of practice. We were as prepared as we would ever be.

That morning, we saw all kinds of devices. Lots of people had created gliders and planes to reach the top of the volcano. We also saw plenty of towers and crane-type devices, which would (most of the time) be pushed up to the volcano. There was even an FRC chassis, made out of extruded aluminum, with a rig set up on top and ready to roll.

We even saw a couple of blimps around – they all looked rather similar to off-the-shelf blimps, though – and there were also a few RC helicopters. It looked like we had some competition.

Our first run at the volcano during judging took one and a half minutes because we overshot. One “sensor” (ping-pong ball) landed on the bottom ring of the volcano; the other five on the top. After reloading and getting approval from the judges for a second flight, we go for the volcano again. This time, it took 30 seconds. All six sensors on that run landed on the top. After we knocked off two of the sensors with our propellers’ thrust, we ended with a total of 9 on the top platform in just about 2 minutes.

For our presentation, we had created a 20-slide PowerPoint. We also came prepared with all the designs and sketches we had made at the beginning of the year.

Afterwards, the whole team went outside and flew our device for a while to celebrate what we felt was a really good run. We loaded our everything onto Mr. Brucker’s car again and waited for the awards ceremony to begin.

Our device’s performance as well as presentation earned us the grand prize for Best Overall Solution, the top award of the competition.