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FRC Team 1418

Vae Victis
Rookie Year:2004
LocationFalls Church, Virginia, USA
DistrictChesapeake
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History

Started in 2004 at George Mason High School as a small team of roughly 10 core members, many of whom did a lot of programming. The team grew significantly in the 2006 season and slowly since then. Over the coming years the team won the 2008 Chesapeake Regional and the 2010 Virginia Regional. In 2014 they were Woodie Flowers Finalists at the Greater DC Regional. Then, in 2016, the team famously rose to the challenge of FIRST Stronghold, building their most successful robot ever and claiming sweeping first-place victories at the Greater DC District Event, Northern VA District Event, and becoming Chesapeake District Tri-State Champions. After a hard fight at the St. Louis World Championships, they made it to quarterfinals in the Newton division, one of the toughest in FRC history.

  • Starting in 2005, team 1418 has brought their robot to both the 3K fun run and the memorial day parade on Memorial Day in the City of Falls Church, VA.

Programming

Until 2014, 1418’s programming team was generic and unimpressive, using LabVIEW for all robot code. However, in 2014, with the assistance of Dustin Spicuzza, the team revamped its programming to use Spicuzza’s RobotPy, to which they made large contributions. Most notable of these contributions was programmer Leon Tan’s creation of pynetworktables2js. They also started using a PyGTK-based driving dashboard to control their robot. In 2015, that system was replaced with the team’s first web-based dashboard.

Erik Boesen, who joined the team in 2016, was unhappy with the code quality and ease of use of the 2015 and 2016 dashboards, and subsequently developed FRC Dashboard, a boilerplate web dashboard system which team 1418 – and several others – continue to use to this day.

The team released a revamped website in 2016 at 1418.team, replacing their old domain of team1418.org.

They have also released several open-source repositories through their GitHub organization, such as:

  • tba.rb, a Ruby library to interact with The Blue Alliance’s API
  • victibot, a simple chatbot for the team’s Discord server
  • VictiScout, a scouting application in Node.js/Electron

Robots

  • 2016 - 2016 robot - Northern VA District Event, Greater DC District, and Chesapeake District champions. Made it to quarterfinals at worlds.
  • 2015 - 2015 robot
  • 2014 - 2014 robot
  • 2008 - Stingray - Won the Chesapeake regional. Named for famed non-member Steve Earl Walsh.
  • 2007 - Manus Tazeronus - Ranked eighth at Chesapeake, finished third. Won the Delphi Driving Tommorrow Design Award.
  • 2006 - Elephantus (Scrapped for parts)
  • 2005 - Manus Imperatorus (mechanically complete, but electronics were yanked in Feb ‘06, up and running again by January 2006)
  • 2004 - The Grue (dismantled summer ‘04) List of all 1418 robots on the team’s website

Other

Published Robot Code
2017
2016
2015
2014