At Rochester Institute of Technology, I was looking through the list of merit scholarships when one in particular caught my eye. The FIRST Robotics scholarship at RIT awards $6,000 a year simply for being on a FIRST team in high school. I.e., you could come in with a 2.0 GPA (unlikely) to study English (also unlikely), but so long as you were on a FIRST team in high school, you are eligible for this scholarship.

I want to give a shout-out to team 424, whose captain I met today at Cornell. He guessed I was on a FIRST team by my team T-shirt (I somehow accumulated 3 of them this year, so I’m wearing them to most of the bigger name colleges I’m visiting).

In an engineering building at Cornell, there was a display of mechanical devices. One of which was a model of a gyroscope, which had a caption that puts to rest once and for all whether a reaction wheel is more effective than a gyroscope: “…reaction wheels, apply torque simply by changing the rotor spin speed, but CMG (fancy acronym for gyropscope) are far more power efficient. For a few hundred Watts and about 100 kg of mass, llarge CMGs have produced thousands of Nm of torque, enough to flip over an SUV. A reaction wheel of similar capability would require megawatts of power.

Finally, in a nearby hall, I spotted more or less our cart design, except actually fabricated! That’s right, a group at Cornell built a crab drive cart that carries land mine detection equipment. Needless to say, I took plenty of pictures for later review.

I’ll be back sometime after Battle o’ Baltimore. Who knows how many more times I’ll see FIRST related things before then!