I appreciate the all the nice things said about my team's performance at SVR. I am glad we weren't the only team who thought we were good. We were surprised we didn't get chosen, sort of.
We knew our minibot wasn't the best, it was a pathetic 3.5 second climb, but we did successfully deploy it several times during qualifications, winning us at least one round. However the refs were very inconsistent with how they judged us so they sometimes counted our mini-bot but they disabled our tower twice, both times they were wrong and we were able to cite the rules and prove how it could physically not have been above the line, costing us one or two wins.
We could have also won another of our matches if we had completed our second logo (we had the triangle in possession) rather than going for minibot, which failed do to a hardware failure, basically our minibot got stuck on our hostbot.
We had actually been working on our autonomous using dead reckoning and line sensors. But were slowed down when we discovered that our encoders on our wheels were different counts per rotation, which explained our turning on the practice field while testing. We also had been rather hesitant after our first practice round at LA where a bug in the code caused us to start smoking during autonomous as we roasted a motor.
Our team was sort of depressed when we weren't chosen, as this is our last regional and this was a large portion of our team, including myself, are graduating. But we can always do better during the offseason competitions and next year when we will be using our swerve drive
(which is made just we didn't have time to implement into the robot), that way we won't be able to be defended anymore. But overall we are proud of our robot, we had good driving, a decent minibot, and a good scoring robot. We learned a lot this year, and we will improve our performance next year. In the end we did our best, learned a lot, and had fun. With that said winning really doesn't matter too much to us.
We were surprised by the lack of scouting/preparation of the alliance captains at SVR. Even though we knew after friday that we would not be an alliance captain, we still had a team of 6 students in the stands scouting for us, when we brought only 12-15 to the tournament. My team believes that the lack of adequate scouting and preparation of alliance captains is why so many good teams were not chosen for eliminations. I noticed that a some of the lower seeded alliances picked the next person down on the list rather than a team that would have been better for their alliance.
Again thanks for the compliments about our robot's performance.