I'm going to piggyback onto this thread with my own thoughts about the event. I am not yet capable of producing a coherent thought, so I'll just make a list.
Bad Things:
- Don't high-five, like, three hundred kids. I had a fever for two days.
- Our first coopertition balance was initially awarded as two points, then revised to one. One point was the correct call there, but I wish someone would've told us that the revision happened.
- Bricking the cRio minutes before our post-lunch qualifying match on Friday, nearly missing it entirely and otherwise having to compete without any configuration files on the robot, making us unable to do much beyond drive. Our only qualifying loss
- We lost
Good Things:
- I met WAY more people than I was expecting to while there. I don't post here a lot these days, but was still recognized quite a bit; that was a bit surprising.
- We were first seed for the first time in our team's history, thanks to an aggressive coopertition balance strategy and a solid robot to back it up.
- We are very happy to have won the Innovation in Control award for our catapult with full range/power adjustment using only air.
- 118: Again, it was completely awesome to work with you all as alliance partners. You build amazing, gorgeous machines, but bring excellent strategic thinking to the field along with them and that always makes it a blast to compete with you. Even without your really cool balance mechanism, your machine was capable of outscoring, by itself, nearly any other alliance at the event and I wish more people would recognize how amazing that is. Everyone is focusing on the triple robot balance while I think the real story to come out of Alamo should be how crazy basketball scoring is going to become in the next several weeks.
- 3325: I am consistently impressed by teams that step up their game in the elimination rounds and produce stellar results. You all played fantastic, smart defense for our alliance and made it impossible for anyone to know that it was your first time playing in an elimination tournament. You were calm, collected and knew exactly where your robot needed to be on the field to be its most effective at all times. You balanced bridges with our team as if you'd been doing it all day.
- 4063: This team was our neighbor in the pit and our partners in our first qualifying round and I was completely blown away by how well they handled themselves. My team's been around for more than ten years and we are not half as put together as these folks were -- their coach and drivers knew exactly what to do during a match, knew exactly what strategies to watch out for and put their robot to good use. In the pit, they had several videos playing showcasing their team and, as a rookie team, won the Gracious Professionalism Award. That is awesome. I will admit, thought, I'm a bit flabbergasted that they *didn't* win the Rookie Inspiration Award or Rookie All-Star Award. They were really awesome. Watch out, San Antonio, these folks will be formidable next year.
- Loved the laid back volunteer crew at the event; things ran a bit behind schedule, but nobody was freaking out about it and everything was relaxed and calm. I know that here in Seattle, the crew prides itself on being on or ahead of schedule, but there's something to be said for the way they did things in Texas.
- So far, the real-time penalty process seems to work okay; I am surprised by that.
- The Rattler wasn't as bad a ride as I expected it to be.
The team had a great time in Texas and is very happy with the ways things went for us while we were there. Some bad luck in the semi-final meant that our trip ended a bit sooner than we'd have liked, but we are confident that we had a very strong alliance and we are looking forward to bringing what we learned to Seattle in a few weeks.