MMRambotics

Hello,

So I was at OTHS workshop today and we had a presentation from Ed Thompson he works for Absolute Motivation. They help businesses prepare business plans and things like that he gave us a presentation on how to create a effective business plan. In one of the slides there is link to a website called linkedin. linkedin allows you to search for companies and see a list of that companies employees and their contact info. So on Tuesday we MUST create a business plan if we want to be successful we also need to show companies how they get return on there donation through ads or other methods. Another good point is that there not funding a robot but rather there funding the students futures. This is very important because companies wont be interested in paying for a couple of student to build a robot the idea of funding a students future is much more attractive to a company. When a company says "Why do you need our money?" the answer is NOT, We need to pay for the expensive competition. The correct answer is simple, To promote Science and Technology among students. Competition is another hard part about fundraiseing, if there are 15 teams in burlington and say 150 companies that are willing to give a donation and Team A starts contacting companies during the first week of school and we start 4 weeks later there will be little money left for us. Other interesting topics that were covered was the use of solid-works to design the full robot, for me it is much easier to use FIRST will give is full licenses we just need to contact them. We were lucky enough to see the new control system it seems much more versitle than the old kwik-byte system, There is a really neat thing there using for the IO of the DS. It is a PSoC with a cap-touch sensor, proximity sensor, Accelerometer and lots more. It will be really interesting to see what we can do with all the sensors on that board. Lastly i want to try and get more people to join the team the best way to do this is to get the robot to drive around during the meeting it will be more engaging than us just talking. We should also show videos. I want to show this attached presentation. We must go to our old sponsors this week before they forget about us!!! Oh and another big part of getting sponsors is networking see who's parents work where and contact those companies. Then meet with those companies if we don't have the money soon i cant see us participating. When meeting with a company always have the attitude that we will make it to the championship and we will win, if we truly believe this so will the potential sponsors!

-Sean Noseworthy