[Jonathan Norris]

The New York Regional was a huge roller coaster ride for 2809 this year. We had every problem possible all Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. It seemed like when we got one issue sorted out something else would come up and stop us from working. I think in total we were working for 2.5 out of 8 qualification matches...

It all started on Friday where we spent the morning upgrading our arm motor from a window motor to Fisher Price motor, this worked great. Then after some re-wiring of our electrical box after build season (our electrical system is self contained in removable boxes), there were issues when it was all connected back into the robot. We finally got it all working by the end of the day friday for one of the last practice matches, things go well we put up a couple tubes and test our mini-bot deployment, Bam! it goes up without a hitch! The team leaves for the day excited for competition to start on Saturday and show what we can do.

This is where the issues start creeping in. First match we don't move... no idea what it is, the FTA says it looks like a radio issues, we replace the radio, next we figure out that our radio transformer dies under any load, replaced that. Finally once we get the radio and transformer replaced, we start the match put up a logo in about 40 seconds and then our partner accidentally rips our armor off and our radio that was temporarily attached to it off our robot...

By the end of saturday we had only been working for about a match and a half, we knew we had a good robot if only we could get it working. We also knew we had a very fast minibot if only we could deploy it, in the one match we were able to get to the pole our minibot failed to deploy. We needed time to work on it, but the electrical gremlins just wouldn't go away.

Our first match on Sunday morning after we had hoped we had solved all our issues, but we didn't move... CAN bus errors. We dove right into our Jaguars to try and figure out the problem, we had a very helpful NI representative who helped us find the dead jag and replace it. Our last qualification match, we had only really shown what we could do in one and a half matches all tournament, Our robot was mechanically working, Jaguars working, radio working... and in Autonomous our robot gets the ubertube ringed on our arm...

Going into Alliance selection we had no idea if anyone would take a chance on picking us, but we knew that we could be a very good partner in an alliance if we were working. First round goes by and we are not picked, we go all the way up to the second last pick and finally teams 335 and 1230 are willing to take a chance on the potential of our robot. In our first quarter finals match the robot works great and our drivers finnaly get a chance to show off what we can do, we score 6 tubes while our partners put up another three. The team gives off a collective sigh of relief, FINALLY we were working! All the way into the finals our three robots worked great, our team putting up the majority of the tubes, while our partners 335 and 1230 fed us tubes, played great defense, and most importantly got minibots up the pole. We knew that the top alliance was going to be very hard to beat, they were just rounding into form, but some robot issues on our alliance prevented us from giving it our all in the finals. Congratulations again to 395, 359, and 527!

Through all this what I was most impressed with was how our great group of students and mentors handled it all, they were professional all weekend never getting to disappointed when the robot was not working, and worked their tails off to get it all fixed. The team worked so hard this weekend and went through alot, to make it to the finals felt so good after everything we went through. We have work to do to be ready for GTR in week 5, minibot deployment and consistant autonomous are on the top of our list.

Thank you to all the New York teams for hosting us this weekend and helping us out!