2017 Season

Apex Robotics has had an incredible 2017 season. This year we attended Auburn Mountainview, Mount Vernon, Glacier Peak, the PNW District Championship, and FIRST Championship Houston. We won our first two events, and though some problems prevented us from placing well at the District Championship and the Houston Championship, we still worked our hardest to represent our team, our school, and our community as well as possible. To follow our progress through the 2017 season, check out thebluealliance.com/team/5803

Congratulations are very much in order to the #1 alliance on Roebling, teams 973, 1011, 2928, and 5499. We had a lot of fun going up against your amazing alliance in the quarterfinals! We would especially like to congratulate Team 2928 Viking Robotics for becoming the first ever PNW team to win a championship at the world level!

We would also like to thank our alliance partners, 1477, 1414, and 6508. We put up a good fight against the championship-winning alliance and were very happy to be competing alongside some extremely strong robots!

Lastly we would like to announce that our offseason, Peak Performance, will be back for a second year! The date will be announced soon, so stay tuned at offseason.apexfrc.com and sign up for update emails by sending an email to peakperformance@apexfrc.com

Thank you to everyone who made this season a success. We'll be back!

Auburn Mountainview

Apex competed at Auburn Mountainview this past weekend, our first district event. We all had a wonderful time, and after two days of hard work, Apex Robotics ended up taking the winner's trophy! We also were awarded the Industrial Design Award, and ranked fifth in the qualifications.

Apex would like to thank team 4915 Spartronics and team 3223 The ROCK, our outstanding alliance partners! We would also like to thank all of the teams at the event, the judges, the volunteers, the parents, and everyone else for making the weekend such a resounding success.

Barring minor problems here and there, Apex's robot, HAILSTORM, had few issues during the event. The worst problem required a swap of the entire climber sub-assembly, but fortunately was not a real pain for us as we had a spare. We also added our gear-securer mechanism to the rear of our robot, preventing gears from falling out of our gearer when hit. The mechanism that feeds our shooter has been modified so it does not jam, and our shooter is now functional. We ended up disabling our fuel collector in favor of a more consistent climb for this event only.

In the two weeks until Mount Vernon we plan to tune our shooter and improve our gear securing mechanism. We also plan to add an additional 775pro motor to power our ball collector.

We look forward to seeing you at Mount Vernon, Glacier Peak, or PNW District Championship. Thank you all again for an amazing season so far!

Bag Day!

2017's bag day was a huge success for Apex Robotics. Our second competition robot has been bagged and tagged, and this year our practice robot is both sturdier and more accurate to the competition bot. It's time to celebrate!

Apex is throwing a reveal party open to all on February 27th from 7:00 to 8:30 in the Seattle Christian School auditorium. Admission is free and refreshments will be provided. It should be a lot of fun!

The Apex Robotics 2017 reveal video will be released very soon. Media is working as hard as possible on polishing it down to every last detail.

Just a side note, the website has been updated with a new "files" tab. There's nothing on that tab yet, but check back soon for file releases. The robot portal has been mostly updated, although the Hailstorm and MagiKarp pages are still under construction and currently throw a 403 error. This will most likely be fixed within the week.

Finally, Apex Robotics would like to express their gratitude to all the 2017 (and 2016) sponsors for their generosity. Our team wouldn't be here without you. The sponsors page will be updated very soon with a new layout and logos as a sign of our gratitude. Thank you!

Build Season Update

Hello FRC teams and fans! As there hasn't been an update in a while, I wanted to assure everyone that Apex is still striving to reach the peak of excellence!

Build season began in January and now we have a few more weeks to compete everything and ready up for STEAMWORKS! Right now, Apex is working on finishing the practice robot and starting to build the competition bot. Next week, it's coding time! Our wonderful programmers have been working with additional technology, utilizing PartyStalker v.01, our recommissioned off-season robot, as a guinea pig. Meanwhile our electrical team is still doing double duty and pitching in to help fabricate both bots.

Documentation and Media have lost some members, but are still striving to put out content on the less visible fronts of Apex. Apex's animation for the Digital Animation Award has been submitted a few months after its announcement, and work on the reveal video has now commenced.

We want to thank our amazing sponsors for their contribution. Without the help of C4 Labs, AeroTEC, and Concept Systems, our robot would not look or perform as well as it (hopefully!) will. We also want to thank fellow PNW team 2046 for helping us out with cutting our drive rails! Thanks to all the people that have helped keep this season going!

We look forward to seeing friends and competing at Auburn Mountainview. Until then, we wish our fellow robotics teams a smooth build season and a great run in STEAMWORKS!