Category: Competitions

Attendance

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• Fletcher
• Mark
• Hunter
• Dante
• Erik
• Evan

Journal

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Tasks

• Get first place
• Get the Inspire award
• Get chosen for the winning alliance

Reflections

At this competition at the beautiful Webb School in Claremont, California, we had a great time.  We started our day by setting up our poster board which we built the night before.  Many teams were impressed how we had a monitor in our poster board.  After, Hunter, Fletcher, and Evan went and did hardware and software inspection and Mark, Erik, and Dante went and scouted.

The inspections were uneventful; we had to update a couple things, firmware and program chooser namely.  The robot passed.

Scouting went well.  We scouted 7 of the 14 teams at the beginning and 7 of the 14 teams at lunch.

Then came our first match.  It started wonderfully with the flawless blocking autonomous, then came the TeleOp phase where we got 2 rings on the top level for 30 points, which won us the match, 30 – 0.

Our second match came, going similarly to the first.  We won again, 15 – 0, putting us in 1st place.

We then had lunch, and during our lunch we put rubber inserts into the treads on the robot in order to give it more traction.

Our third match came and did not go how we expected.  The autonomous worked, but it struggled turning.  The TeleOp phase also did not go smoothly.  Rings were not gotten from the dispenser quiet so well, rings were not put on the rack easily, rings were dropped.  We did not win this match, so we investigated the problem between matches.  We had too much traction.  The rubber inserts did what they were designed to do, but they did that too well.

After lunch, we removed them and all was well, but our most difficult opponents were yet to come.

We had a match where we and our alliance partner felt that we could get 2 tic-tac-toe bonuses, though we did not, and we ended the match losing badly.

We had another lost match, and ended the tournament in 14th.

Attendance

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• Mark
• Evan
• Hunter
• Chris
• Dante
• Erik
• Fletcher

Journal

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Tasks

• Either get in the top four or get chosen for an alliance
• Make our robot work every time we have a match
• Make it through all inspections
• Put at least one ring on the top row
• Win most of our matches
• Do good

Reflections

Today was our first field competition, at Coachella valley.  Although we didn’t win or qualify,   in hindsight it went very well and was extremely good for a first competition.  With some difficulty we were finally able to get through the hardware, software, and field inspection.  With just a few more modifications to our programming and hardware design we finally got all of the components we had on our robot to work, at least after taking off the primitive forklift that was not quite ready yet to use.  In the first match out robot score one point by dropping accidentally a single ring onto the middle goal.  In our second match we actually put two rings on one of the top pegs on the center goal and won the match.  That was definitely our best run because on the others we weren’t able to put any rings on and we only won one other match because of our alliance.  Also, on a good note, our autonomous we had did make the robot move every single time which stood out from other robots of which only about 5 more even had a working autonomous.  Our autonomous did nothing but move our robot on the center goal but it was comforting to know that it worked how we wanted it to.  In the end, the biggest problem with our robot was the compete slowness of the scissor lift, that and the fact that our hand was a little too complicated and we needed to simplify and strengthen it.  It was a pretty successful first competition but we had a lot of work in the week ahead in moth modifying the robot but mostly in driver practice.  In that competition Dante drove the robot and Erik did accessories but neither of them had any prior practice because the robot didn’t start working like we wanted until the night before so we planned to spend a lot of time in the next week doing mostly driver practice and improving our notebook.