Well I think that we did great, even better than I had hoped for.
We had some problems which were delt with, sadly we did loose our ball catcher. And alot of our work had revolved around using that devise, so without it we were relegated to running laps. We did run very fast, and after our couple of issues with the judgments of Ref’s about penalties Cameron did an amazing job of dodging the other bots and not slamming into the field. We could have always done better, but that’s a black hole do discuss the infinate things which should have been handled differently just now.
We have a meeting today after school in the wood shop,
and
The Parents and Mentors have a meeting on thursday evening at Round table Pizza.
There’s the time and place for the conversations about who and what and how and why…
We are also waiting for our glorious Robot to return to us.
Anyway we did a really good job out there, So we’ll see you today
Just a quick update to say that we were not used as backup in the final matches. But wow, those were amazing matches. At the end of one of them, the entire red alliance ended up in a dogpile (robotpile?) on the home stretch. There was some amazing ball-tossing, lap-running, and robot-tipping. Congrats, everyone!
Well, the qualifying matches have ended, and we were ranked 22/55. We weren’t selected for the finals, but we are secondary backups, so we’re staying here on call to replace another team.
We’re about to play our 6th match — and we think everything should go perfectly. we have made no major changes since the last match, so hopefully…
We currently rank 38/55. it was 29/55 earlier, but some teams must have won matches. Hopefully we’ll do well enough on this match to bump up the ranking a little.
We just finished our 5th match. The robot drove just beautifully, and the autonomous mode driving was perfect - it went nice and slowly, and hit the opposing wall after almost exactly 15 seconds. It seems that there may be something wrong with the pneumatic cylinder though, as they never tried it. of course, they never stopped under a ball, so they may not have tried. we’ll have to find out.
EDIT: The cylinder works, they just weren’t able to use it due to other robots hitting us. So everything worked perfectly!!
We’re about to play our fifth match at the Pacific Northwest regional competition. We’ve been having trouble getting the pneumatic piston to work, but the problems seem to be corrected now with some significant design changes. We think the drive system is ready and the pneumatic actuator works, and we have code for autonomous that should just drive forward slowly, although that has not yet been tested.
We’ll just have to see how it goes.
Today was the starting day of the competition where all the teams unpacked, fixed minor (and major) problems, did 3 practice rounds, and met the other teams. We did not make it to our first practice round, and during the second round our arm unfortunately broke into a few pieces, and was not fix-able. After the second practice round we had our safety inspection, and we were a few pounds over weight so we just took the entire arm and all of the arm hardware off completely. During our third match the flag pole fell down and we ended up accidentally using it as a skewer against other robots. Now we are back at Franklin fixing a few things and making out robot legal.
Today was the first day of the competition, however, we are not actually competing today, just fixing the robot and playing practice rounds. We were unable to attend our first practice competition because the robot was not ready. Our second practice round was very interesting — the arms fell down and wouldn’t go back up. A malicious robot then ran them over, resulting in their destruction. The third match was by far the scariest. The robot started hybrid period by spinning uncontrollably in circles. It then proceeded to get another robot stuck, followed by the flag pole falling down, the flag falling out and the lap indicator vanishing. Right now, we are making repairs, in addition to fixing the few things that the safety inspectors have asked us to modify. At this point, it’s looking like we will not be using any form of arms to “herd” the ball, however, we are reasonably certain that we will be able to knock balls off of the overpass. In a second-to-worst case scenario, we could just run around the track quickly, and do nothing else. In a worst case scenario, our robot may do nothing at all, however, this is highly unlikely.
Some of the robots here from other teams are amazing! There are some very creative designs, including a variety of lifting and catching devices, a small robot that does nothing but go in circles around the track at high speed, and one robot that manages to launch balls over the overpass. One particularly tall forklift-style robot tipped over when it made a (successful) last-ditch effort to get the trackball back onto the overpass.
Hopefully we’ll have a better functioning robot tomorrow…
The robot shipped several days ago. We were sad to see it go… parting is such sweet sorrow. We’re planning what to do when we get to the competition and have some more time to work on the bot. There’s hybrid mode code to be tested, motors to be changed out, and so on.
We’re into button production full speed ahead. There are 4 different styles of buttons, but if you want to see them, you’ll have to visit us at the competition. We also have some comics in the works that should appear on our website soon.
The robot MUST be gone by the 19th of February. That’s tomorrow. At exactly midnight, the robot has to leave. So, we are all panicked since the robot is not ready to leave. We have spent all day fixing little (and big) problems, preparing paperwork, checking for compliance with all rules, and generally panicking about everything. Testing has been delayed, but at this point we are thinking that the robot will still work okay at the competition, although perhaps not as well as we had hoped for.
