2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Who's ready?
About half of 2047 is composed of Whitney Young students, and we attend school three blocks away from the UIC Pavilion. I believe that team 'Impossible Mission Force' has a healthy chunk of Whitney Young students as well, and they should be making an appearance there as well.

This is going to be Team Challenger's second regional ever, and we're almost certain that the Wisconsin regional taught us enough to give everyone a run for their money.

We've heard that some tough cookies like Wildstang will be competing, so this will definitely be an exciting round-about.

Who's coming? Maybe we can all get together and eat dinner after the Thursday matches. 2047 knows where all the good eats are at :)

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

HA! Tough cookies like 111??? Haha... j/k. A top tier team right there. But seriously. MWR is going to rock the stuff this week. Look out for teams such as 71, 107, 111, 288, 501, 648 (duh!), 1525, and 1625. All those teams produce good machines. Especially that last one. A third year team and already have two regional W's and a Galileo Finalist?? lol. I predict that two or more of those great veteran teams listed before will ally with each other. Seems to happen every year.

I, personally, am looking forward to staying at the same hotel as 107 and just chilling with them after the events. Same goes for the Championship, too. Lav and 107 are great people. TWISTER! Team 648 and I made a twister mat and flicker board for about 30 people or so to play. No video games are allowed from 648 this year! Per my orders.*





*I had to make a playlist for my iPod that has "okay-to-play" songs on it. Mom won't let me play my "devil music" around them. LOL. Doesn't she know I'm Christian, too? Sorry, I just thought someone would chuckle from that.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Just from past experience I am sorta scared slash really interested in what Beatty and Wildstang came up with. I will make sure to get good pictures of them thursday and post them here so others can see. I can't wait for the competition, it should be really fun!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

I sure hope we do well during this week's Midwest regional. We got so close in the Milwaukee regional! We got into the semi-finals with The "green machine" and "UltraViolet" even though we were seeded 32nd, but fortunatly good scouting allowed us to be picked for the 2nd seed! It was unfortunate that the "green machine's" drive system broke down during our final elimination match before the finals, but we only lost by 6 points in a 2 against 3 match (with the help of the green machine's ramps) I wish everyone the best of luck. Go Hilltoppers! Team 1732!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Hey, you guys were our pit neighbors!

Did you hear the giant groan from the top of the stands when we saw that match? You guys had three of our favorite bots from the competition, and alot of us from 2047 thought you guys were going to go all the way. At any rate, you sure did give everyone a run for their money!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

The Midwest Regional has a great tradition and I can't wait to see what our friends have in store for us this year. Team 107 is "ramped" and ready to go!

Looking forward to a great round of Twister too!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

For us, that was like a dream team-- The Green Machine was my favorite robot--I was thrilled when they picked us, and then topped off with UltraViolet. It's too bad the transmissions blew when they did, but hey, we'll try again this week!

Good luck all!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Milwaukee was awesome, and I know the Midwest will be too. We actually had a decent bot by the time we got to the regional, and with how we did in Milwaukee, I can't wait to find out how we'll stand up to the heavy hitters like 111 and the beast. Best of luck to everyone going.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

I saw you guys(1732) at Milwaukee and you guys did very well in finals. I was rooting for your alliance and the number five alliance because they had rockford robotics who we are sorta mentoring. I was glad to see you guys do well this year. See ya in a couple of days!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Hey Lav! Is 107 bringing any Vex robots? I'll have at least one of mine there. It's pretty pimped out. Nearly a scale model of our 07 bot. Definitely looking forward to a sweet game of Twister on Thursday or Friday night. Not sure when it is. I can't wait to see what 107 brings in their arsenal also. A 107 ramp bot sounds like a perfect compliment to our bot.

Good luck to all the teams coming to Chicago. God, I'm so excited!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

me, val, and roxanna are gunna be there cheering on wildstang :) on saturday!
-Courty-

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Is it just me, or are all the drivers getting just a bit more vicious with each match?

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Thursday was absolutely ridiculous. One team in particular (who I'm not going to name) smashed us into the rack and managed to break our PVC arm. They didn't break the glued parts, they actually snapped the PVC. In addition, they had a fairly thin chassis with no bumpers, so they somehow climbed up on our bumpers and broke off our radio, which was mounted vertically right above and slightly inward from the bumper. Needless to say, we spent plenty of time fixing after that.

There were also several other teams that were pretty rough.

During the qualification rounds, I thought the viciousness decreased by quite a bit, but the elimination rounds got pretty nasty. The judges didn't seem to be watching out for this sort of thing too carefully either. I only remember one 10pt penalty for breaking the bumper zone, and that was when a team got their arm stuck inside Wildstang.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Ouch, tell me about it. Sometimes it just got downright brutal. Did you see what happened to the Beast? Yikes.

Our arm/gripper took quite a beating through all the matches, but luckily nothing that wasn't fixable. Although it did get scary during the match.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Yeah, Spencer from 1982 told me that they had to replace their claw TWICE.

I was crying for 447, and I was in tears for 1710! Our alliance partner in the semifinals, 1706, had their track knocked off their claw system. Then 2112 got stuck on our Lexan panels after pinning us in the corner, which made everyone in our side fall out of their chairs.

One of the volunteers suggested to our drivers to act more aggressively, and I raised an eyebrow to that.

No one was that aggressive at Milwaukee!

But WOW. That was the craziest final I've seen ANYWHERE in the sports world. Grats to everyone! Especially 648 for that awesome display of autonomous sock rocking.

2047 will see everyone in Atlanta. But... the thing is...
I kind of promised the girls on the team that I'd wear a dress at the Championship if we went D:

Oh, out of curiosity... did anyone notice the 'FIRST Cadenza' poster I put up in our pit? :p

GREAT JOB EVERYONE! The judges and FIRST staffers won't forget the 2007 Midwest Regional anytime soon!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

The Midwest Regional is always one of the more hotly contested regionals and there is always a display of pure performance in the elimination rounds. I'm just glad 648 made it out with only having a chain jump off of a sprocket. We had at least one robot on us at all time, most of the time two. They were battering us from all sides. Multiple times did our arm get stuck inside the rack. We were penalized for having our arm inside of Wildstang, but it most certainly wasn't intentional. When we released the tube the arm went right down into their robot.

I was terribly sad to have to face our good friends, 107, in the quarterfinals. That was one tough round. Then again, all of the first seeded alliance's rounds were sent to overtime.

Congrats to 71 for winning Chairman's at MWR.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

That was easily the most stressful and the most intense 20 minutes of my life.

648 et al: You play hard. You earned our spot as much as we did.

Wildstang et al: Many thanks. Couldn't have done it without you.

(If you look in the webcast, I'm the skinny white kid in the blue labcoat in 904's station.)

EDIT:
And thank you to a very important team: 71 for lending us a battery at the end.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

FRC 648 was awesome in autonomous mode! Well done!

The only robot I saw score in autonomous mode during 2 regionals.

This happened during the opening autonomous mode in the 3rd Match of a marathon, 5 match Midwest Regional Final.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItPEIEFqthI

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Team Roboto 447 would like to thank 1000 and 648 for an awesome runner-up alliance.
Congrats to 111 and the remainder of the Winning Midwest Alliance.
Congrats to 71 on your Chairmans award.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Does anyone have video of the rest of the finals from the Mid-West regional? Particularity looking for the semi-final matches with 501 and 71.

Thanks,

Justin

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

It's coming. It takes a decent amount of work to parse up the video of the matches and recompress them for download, though. I would have liked to get it all done yesterday but I had to spend most of the day catching up on all the other stuff that I've been ignoring to do FIRST ;)

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

I'm hoping that by the end of the week I'll have all of my video footage downloaded to my computer and then I can upload anything that pertains to 71 or 501 to the internet somewhere. I don't have much, though, only the semifinals.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

we were getting pushed around so much that we need to make johnny pull some starcraft awsomeness on teh feild. but congrats to everyone and thank you for everything! i had a blast at midwest and ya'll are craaaazy when it copmes to cheering!
and adrian, if i make teh dress your wearing it to natin... i mean championships!
and wowza :ahh: will we need to do repairs on Lola come atlanta... some teams were vicious. .. yep there be my 2 cents
now off to fundraise like crazy

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Hope to see ya down there in Atlanta. (Maybe our pits will be next to eachother again!) Weren't you guys like in at least 4 of our matches, either with or against us, in addition to the ones up at the Wisconsin Regional? You guys had a solid machine, no doubt about it, especially that holonomic drive. It was a pleasure playing with y'all through all those matches.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

MWR was a ton of fun. 1243 and 1781 were great partners, although we lost in the semifinals. If only 1243's arm didn't break in the 2nd semi final match, because we had a great plan to beat Wildstang. Anyway, next stop is Atlanta!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Yeah, sorry about the failure. What happened was that the master link came out of the 1st reduction drive chain for the arm. It was fine all through GLR and MWR up to that point! It did allow us to play some pretty effective D against Wildstang at the rack which we were happy with, but they had one more option up their sleeve than we did with their dual ramp. Guess it just wasn't our time. The elims were still a ton of fun and we thank you guys for picking us!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

If it wasn't for your scoring and lifting abilities, we wouldn't have made it past the first round, so don't feel bad about it. We had a good run. It also reminded us of the Wisconsin Regional where 1816's transmission broke in the semi-finals. If I was another team, I wouldn't want to be our alliance partner becauase it seems that we are bad luck...

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Yep! It was quite a beast you guys had, we all agreed that we'd rather play WITH you than AGAINST you :P
Our holonomic drive got us the speed and maneuverability, but we underestimated how much of a role defense was going to play in the competitions~

We'll see you in Atlanta! Hmmm... is it peach season?

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

You guys didn't have much luck getting up ramps, did you? That's probably the worst part of having a holomonic drive this year, once you attempt an incline you start sliding right back down.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

If anyone is still looking for video of 71 and 501 I can probably post some of our matches (I'm from 1739 their 3rd alliance partner).

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

I was about to download my footage to my computer but my mom apparently left my cord at her work or in someone else's car... I might as well go blow the $40 on a new one... I'll never get it.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Our ramp dilemma had two key problems:

1) Our omni wheels had little to no traction. Two of them were also bent slightly, but we're fixing that now as well.

2) Due to the mechanical reality of the robot, our normal program designed to drive 'straight' usually made Lola veer to the side or spin a little, if you noticed during some of our earlier autonomous modes. You might have noticed the paper 'hubcaps' with black and white slices of color on our wheels. Those, in combination with sensors which read the rate at which the wheel rotated via the rate at which the black and white slices went past the sensor. We added a program that would cause the motors to 'auto adjust' to the rate of rotation of the other wheels to allow Lola to drive straight.
It didn't work out as well as we wished, since we had to ship the robot before we could finalize the testing.

We're fixing the program right now, and we're keeping skateboard tape for any ramp bots that may alliance with us, so hopefully that'll aid us a bit!

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

The Blue Alliance has video from the the finals matches, but nothing else from the regional.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

FYI, I finished the rest of the Midwest match videos and uploaded them to our site (http://media.wildstang.org/MWR07/). I imagine they'll be on TBA as soon as the guys there get a chance to grab them and convert to FLVs.

I'm working on the remaining St. Louis videos now as well.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Thanks Dave!!! I've been looking forward to checking this out.

-Justin

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

I just posted a spreadsheet in white papers that gives a strength of schedule measure and RPI for the teams in qualifying at the 07 MWR--3 toughest schedules were 107, 2112, 1761--3 easiest were 111, 74, 1000. 14 of the top 15 ranked teams had schedules that were easier than neutral.

Re: 2007 Midwest Regional!
 

Does anyone know where I can find video of the awards ceremonies from MWR?