[svenw]

On behalf of team 781 I would like to thank our amazing alliance partners 2016 and 177 for picking us. Not many teams know about us. In fact, very few Canadian teams are recognized on the world stage due to the difficulty of making it to the championships from a Canadian regional. This is why we were so surprised and excited that we not only made it to Championships this year, but we were able to compete on Einstein.

I know that myself and the rest of the drive team had a great time competing with you guys. It was a real blast and we have never been so excited.I don't think we slept at all during our 15 hour bus ride home, we were all too busy talking about what we had just accomplished.

2016: You guys had an amazing bot and deserved your top seed on Archimedes. Ever since I saw your unveil video at the beginning of the season I knew you guys were going to be a threat where ever you went.

177: You guys were just awesome, I now understand why your team has made it to Einstein the last 6 years in a row.

254, 111, 973: Wow what an alliance, 2 of the top scorers and 973 as defence! You guys most definitely assembled a killer alliance and it would of been very difficult to overcome you guys even if it was 3 on 3. Who knows... if we get invited to IRI this year maybe we can replay the match (losing alliance buys the other alliance a couple pretzels.)*

Last but not least I would like to thank Curtis and the rest of the field maintenance, you guys did an awesome job taping up the lines, and were great to deal with.

And to answer the question that everyone had been asking, “What happened?”. We noticed that we lost communications after the second semi final match on Einstein, the FTAs noticed that we still had communications and insisted that our Classmate had frozen up and suggested that we simply reboot it. We rebooted our classmate, tethered up and were able to operate the robot, we placed the robot on the field again lined everything up and waited for the match to start. To our surprise our robot went through the first 3 seconds of autonomous and then stopped, we sat there the entire match wondering what could possibly of gone wrong.

After the match we rushed to our robot and started diagnoses, we tethered up and had no radio signal light and no motor control(pneumatics still worked though, and we had camera feed). Our alliance called for a time out, and we were going to call in a backup if we were unable get our robot operational again before the time ran out. Because we lost everything that revolved around the sidecar we started there. I tested for any loose connections, and I redid all the wago connections to the sidecar, we tethered up again and everything seemed operational. The drive team as well as myself believed that the root cause of our problems was a wire to the sidecar which had become loose, and that we were going to be fully operational for the next match. But yet again much to our surprise our autonomous cut out in the exact same spot, this is when we knew there was something much worse that had failed with the robot.

So what happened? To be honest we do not quite know, we have theories but can not be certain. After we took our robot home on the 15 hour bus ride we started to do some diagnoses. We ran a tethered autonomous and could not recreate the problem, we ran a wireless autonomous and could not recreate the problem, we even tested our Banebots motor for any case shorting and there was none to be found. What we did find though was that if we tested for a case short while rapidly moving the arm up we achieved some interesting results, and we decided to pull the motor off. One of our mentors tore the motor apart and found that one of the leads had a loose ball of solder on it, as well as that there was evidence of debris on the commutator and brushes. So what do we think happened? The banebots motor was case shorting at a certain point, causing the sidecar to fail momentary and causing us to lose all motor control. Why were we unable to recreate this once we got home? The only hypothesis we have for this, is that the debris which was causing the case short had loosened up during the bus ride home, and no longer created a large enough short to cause a problem.


I hope this cleared a lot of things up.
Sven - team 781 captain and driver

* To those who have never played a match with 177, I must say the drive team is just a lot of fun to deal with, and don’t make any guarantees, you will owe Lyn a pretzel!