Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Thanks Kevin and everyone else who made it loud for Drew. It was a very special moment and day for Drew's parents and everyone else who knew Drew.

I'd like to thank both 2481 and 2202 for being absolutely fantastic alliance partners.

2481:After playing you in the finals in 2010 and 2013 and watching you come up short in the 2012 finals, I'm thrilled you finally captured a win. You are no longer in the conversation for best team without an event win. I thought you were clearly had the best robot at the event and we were thrilled alliance selection fell our way so we could join you. While you were good in Central Illinois, you were dominate at Wisconsin. I can't wait to see your improvements for St. Louis.

2202: From climbing your ramps several times at the pre-ship scrimmage in 2007 to semifinalist together in 2011, I've always thought highly of your team. Your consistent autonomous mode and versatile, smart play was exactly what our alliance needed. It also did not go unnoticed that you were the only one on our alliance to not have any mechanical issues during our run. In a physical game, that is a testament to the quality of your machines. I hope you have the absolute best time in St. Louis as you've definitely earned it!

Congrats to 1714 on the Chairman's award. You continue to raise the bar and push our awards/outreach team do to more.

Thanks again to 48, 171, 1714, 2481 and 4212 for swapping wrist bands for scouting data. And thanks to the event volunteers for being understanding and allowing more of our students to sit in the scouting section.

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

This is easily my favorite regional I've ever attended. You all were so nice, and it was a pleasure being in the pits with you. (I was a pit rep for most of Friday and Saturday, so if you stopped by 3081's pit, you most likely saw me!) :)

It was an amazing experience to even be competitive with you guys, and we were astounded to be in the top 8 at times and finish in the top half. We got to play with and against some amazing alliances, and are grateful so many wonderful teams were willing to work with us. We were disappointed with not making it to eliminations, but we've learned so much over this weekend that we really can't complain.

Thanks for making this a wonderful first time at the Wisconsin regional. Congrats to all teams.

My mom was so inspired that she will be volunteering with me next year (as I will have graduated). It's amazing when FIRST touches the hearts of students, but this is truly one of the most amazing things that could have happened (my mom didn't even want me to join robotics in 2011-12).

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Thank you William, so true and so well said! There were many a tear after that final buzzer sounded. We are so appreciative of everyone who helped make this day dedicated to Drew so special!

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

We had a lot of cooperation issues with our drive team and we also had a lot of problems with the turret witch we ended up just locking down, it just wasn't a very good run at all for us

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Some discussion about Quarter final 2 Match 3 went on over in the "Why does everyone hate this game so much" thread. I had posted video of the match and jeremylee of 1736 had asked if anyone had video of Match 2 of the same quarter final. That thread didn't really seem like the right place for the discussion to continue so I figured this would be more appropriate.

I'll reiterate what I said in the other thread: I'm only posting in the interest of trying to reach a common understanding of how the scoring was done in those two matches. I personally do not think I yet understand fully how either match arrived at the foul points awarded.

Match 3: http://youtu.be/sbJUjhtlHLs

Match 2: http://youtu.be/ZP11DLtqJFE

I already posted all the observations I could glean from match 3 over in the other thread.

For match 2 I see a blue 20pt foul for what appears to be 1736 ramming 706 in the upper left corner of the screen at 1:57.

I see the upper right ref call a foul on red at 2:20, but no signal that it was a technical at about 2:21. My guess is that we were called for a frame perimeter violation against 93 while 3018 was trying to rotate around to shoot in front of the low goal.

Then at 2:34, the ref in the lower right corner calls a foul on blue (again no TF wrist bumping x indication) for what looks like becoming entangled with 3018 while we were shooting.

Personally the 93/3018 interaction toward the end looks like a wash however you want to score it. I don't think either were intentionally trying to do anything to each others robot-- 93 wanted to keep us from scoring and we were trying to score. I could live with a 20 pt foul apiece or no fouls on each. I don't really see how either was escalated to a TF.

The only way I see fouls impacted the final result of this one is if one thinks only red deserved any foul points for the interaction at the end of the match or if one thinks red deserved more. The early foul alone was not enough to change the result.

Everyone sees events differently though due to internal biases, vantage point, etc. I'm far from convinced that the right alliance went on to semi's, but I'm also far from convinced that the wrong one did. It happened-- it was exciting and memorable for all involved. I say congratulations to both alliances.

I do think if these alliances played 10 times straight the score could well be 5-5, but I think the matches would be spectacular to watch.

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Once again Wisconsin was a ton of fun! I actaully had the chance to spend a lot of time walking around the pits (rather than fixing our robot) and met a ton of awesome mentors and students!

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Wow that was awesome! First off, a big thanks to our alliance partners 3018 Nordic Storm and 706 Cyberhawks! We had a great time working with you guys! This was our teams second year in a row making it to the finals, and seeing our usually reserved and professional mentors screaming and dancing (yes, dancing :ahh: ) made this the most amazing experience for our whole team. Congrats to all the teams who competed, we look forward to competing alongside you all next season!

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Just to make it easier for people to see what the sidecar looked like without having to open up the link,

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Thanks for posting this one before we meet on Wednesday, Craig. I could not figure out what exactly happened when watching it over the computer as it switched back and forth a lot. I figured we had a short or something similar to qualification. I only watched these matches, besides my cheering interest, in a scout kind of way. I did not take the official's point of view, so I was quite surprised when we were the winner. I do see now how we were disconnected causing at least 50 points of the penalty in the referee's eyes. It will be interesting to watch our matches as a drive team and a build team to see what direction the information points us for the rest of the season in St. Louis and at Minneapolis for the MSHSL tourney.

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

SMOKIN! That's truly a shame it was a 3-match killer, though. Roll this lesson learned into next year's design: even the best laid out electrical/control system can be improved for easier access/maintenance.

Best of luck at Midwest!

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Actually our problems extended past the sidecar. Due to the sidecar we also messed up a spike which continued our problems when we switched out the old one. When we figured this out we changed out the spike.

The third match was missed because of our bumpers. We could have made it if our mounting system wasn't changed by someone on our team without us realizing it.

Yep it really did suck to miss those matches

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

I agree with your analysis of match 2 as well as your analysis of match 3 from the other thread. Another tough loss in the quarters for us this year, but we'll move on and continue to tweak our "recipe" for success in the years to come.

Our team had a great time at Wisconsin once again competing against so many great teams and great robots. This regional will always be at the top of our list of events for us to attend each year.

Congrats to 2481, 1732, and 2202 on the win. We knew you guys would be a tough alliance to beat. Good luck at champs to you and everyone else who has qualified as well as those with a chance yet to qualify in the coming weeks.

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

Yes-- Match 3 is still a puzzle to me and I suspect sadly for most. Just listening to the reaction to the score in the video shows no one on 3018 was expecting a win. Somehow the refs gave us 100 points and they thought about it a *long* time (2.5 minutes at least), so clearly they had their reasons. I'm not sure if they reviewed video during that time or what. I did not see anyone from our alliance in the question box, but honestly I wasn't looking. It did not seem like anyone from our alliance was anything but disappointed that our robot stopped functioning for the majority of Telop. I know Andrew (our driver) reported they were on their way back to the pits planning the pack-up.

For those curious-- the short Todd speaks of happened in the last round on Friday. We had a jag burn out on us two matches earlier in Q49 (killing the CAN bus and thus essentially our entire robot) and sat idle for the majority of Telop (very similar to Quarter 2 Match 3). But fortunately for 3018, the opposing alliance did not even match the 55 point our alliance put up in autonomous so that failure did not cost us. Team 2081 and 3081 secured the win for our alliance.

We replaced the burned out jag with a brand new jag and it functioned fine for Q54. But in Q61 (a match we were really looking forward to because we were going against our good friends from 1714), the jag went haywire. It killed the CAN bus so we could not control the robot and kept running its motor. The drive team rebooted the CRIO during the match and the motor kept driving the entire reboot and of course the CAN was still dead after the reboot. The match ended and the motor was *still* running.

After the match we had an inspector in the pits checking everything over and it was behaving fine. Best guesses were that either some debris fell in the jag and fell out again when we moved it to the pit (unlikely), or that the jag had some sort of intermittent mfg defect. We replaced it again and the bot was fine for all day Saturday.

So that was 3 matches we sat and watched our robot idle for nearly the entire Telop period-- well not *completely* idle on the one I just described as the ball collector kept spinning that entire Telop (and *beyond* :-)).

This was our first visit to the Wisconsin regional and it was certainly a very memorable one. I know the team thoroughly enjoyed the experience, despite coming up a bit short in the finals and despite the unfortunate way the quarter finals ended.

As this thread attests-- it was a great regional.

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

I was the FTAA for this event. Just so everyone knows, the head ref does NOT review any video footage for the matches. He/she depends on the individual refs to remember just what went on during the match. I saw the head ref querying the other refs on what they saw if there was an issue with penalties.

Re: 2014 Wisconsin Regional
 

4143 had an awesome but busy time at the Wisconsin Regional. Great planning and volunteers makes this event run smooth. There is a reason we keep coming back.

Congrats to 2481, 2202, and 1732. Our friends the Roboteers finally got a deserved regional win. 1732 and 2481 worked together this year to get it done.

Thanks to our alliance partners, 2512 and 876. I thought we might have a chance once we started practicing ball passing. I really thought we had a chance after the first match. We posted the third highest score of the day and gave the winning alliance their only loss. Unfortunately our autonomous went haywire, and the champs were too much when full strength. I haven't seen the videos yet, but I pretty sure there was some aggressive play as both sides wanted a win.

Congrats to 2081 Icarus on their second Engineering Inspiration Award in as many years. You've got to tell us your secret.

I feel for our friends 1736 Robot Casserole. Waiting those long minutes while the striped shirts confer at the truss is the worst part of this game. I knew your alliance was in trouble when Al went out to examine 3018's disconnected router. I'm sure they placed it there for signal strength, but that was really unprotected.

Great to see 2826 again and have some fun swapping frames.

Glad to see 706 doing well. I was hoping to be alliance partners three years in a row. We'll see what next year brings.

To 1259, I'm still mad at you for not completing the triple 30 point climb with 2481 and us last year. It would have been the only one I think. And you were so close... (I'm not really mad, just a little sad).

The Central Illinois Alliance with 171 and 2039 didn't have quite as good of regional, but at least avoided controversy.

Mars/Wars had a great season and hopefully will get to a couple of offseason events. Good luck to everyone going to the Championships.