Ten years of AVC - and of worrying someone will get hurt - and so far so good (knock on wood)

Save the date for SparkFun AVC 2018: September 7-9!

I can’t believe April is almost over, especially since that means that it’s time to hustle on planning this year’s AVC, but what I really can’t believe is that this year marks the 10th anniversary of SparkFun’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition!

Things that have happened in the ten years since AVC began:

• I have spent approximately 150 hours of my life watching Game of Thrones
• "Gangnam Style" (cringe)
• The Kardashian Era (hard to ignore)
• BB-8
• Taylor Swift and I became best friends (in a distant sort of way)
• Cronuts
• Oh yeah - and SparkFun celebrated its 15th anniversary in January! That’s a lot of circuit boards.

Given this milestone, it seems only fitting that to celebrate ten years of friendly, self-driving, car-themed camaraderie, we bring the event back to the home county where it all began.

In ten years we’ve grown to add more competitions – lookin’ at you, you adorable little fighting robot; and YOU, you terrifying, 30-pound, man-eating monster – and now we have too many competitors to host at SparkFun HQ. In order to accommodate both the size and awesomeness of SparkFun AVC 2018, I have the honor of announcing that this year’s event will be held at the Boulder County Fairgrounds in Longmont, CO, a mere ten minutes from the SparkFun lair.

In case you're worried that you'll have to share space with goats, I assure you that if all goes according to plan...yes, there will be goats. And horses (hopefully the wind blows in a favorable direction). We are already casually discussing goat yoga.

To answer everyone’s most pressing questions:

1. Combat Bots will be indoors.
2. AVC will be outdoors on a packed dirt parking lot. And yeah, we’re worried about weather. This is Colorado; WE’RE ALWAYS WORRIED ABOUT WEATHER. That’s why we moved it to September again. I’ll stop yelling.

In all seriousness, we are so excited to create a spectacular experience for this year’s competitors and build on last year’s record-breaking success of over 180 participating teams from all over the country. We have a lot of plans in the works for this year’s event, so stay tuned!