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Unread 01-04-2012, 16:39
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Grim Tuesday Grim Tuesday is offline
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AKA: Simon Bohn
FRC #0639 (Code Red)
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Baltimore MD (JHU)
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Re: 2012 Washington DC Regional

639 had a great time at our first DC regional!

First off, a thanks to our two fantastic alliance partners, 888 and 346. When we were making selections, we took quite a few factors into consideration: Robot orientation, teleop scoring, and hybrid scoring. Every list we made, you guys came out on top. I have no idea how neither of you were already chosen. Honestly, I was expecting 888 to be chosen by the first seed, considering they had the second highest OPR, second only to 1218. I was ecstatic when we got the second robot on our list too! We had a list of 24 teams and only had to go two down. It's unfortunate that we couldn't pull off the triple on the field that we had practiced successfully three times . Also, we had one of if not the highest hybrid score at the event. Regardless, it was one of the best alliances, and I think we honestly could have won the event if we had gotten past the 620 alliance.

As such, I think that there are congratulations in order for the 620, 3123, and 1731 alliance. Our first semifinal was, with combined scores, the second highest scoring match at the event, only second to finals match 2. There was no funny business in our matchup at all. All of our alliance worked, as did yours. There were no uncalled for fouls. It was a win well deserved, and especially to 620, your creativity award was well judged. The combination of dumper/shooter was a really cool and creative mechanism that performed perfectly in eliminations.

Congratulations to the winning alliance, 2914, 467, and 357. To quote one of the members of my team, "467's robot is made of pure 3/16 aluminium sex". 357's Jester drive was also very very neat, I would love to learn more about it. It was great the entire regional, and the gameplay was great in elminations, once again, simply outplaying the opposing alliance.

Speaking of the opposing alliance, we wish 1218 the best of luck at the MAR district championships! We would love to see you guys again in St. Louis.

Finally, congratulations to 461, the RCA winners and 1885 the EI's! We hope to see both of you at the Championships in St. Louis! Every time I hear the judges read off the reasoning behind a Chairmans or EI team, and wonder why we didn't win it, I think to myself "Because these teams are just so $@#$@#$@#$@# awesome". And they are.

Also, a special shoutout to team 174, our friends from the fingerlakes that beat the first seed in the first semifinals match. Once again, fantastic play. There were no broken robots, and no funny business. (Though, in the second semifinals match, the luck you guys encountered was almost comically atrocious: First 174's shooter jammed, then 116 got stuck on the fender, then 1418 tipped over, leaving the entire alliance incapacitated.)

888 mentioned that they were interested in attending the Finger lakes Regional next year, and we would love to see them in attendance!


We do have a few criticisms of the event. I was trying to decide whether or not to post them, but I'll preface this with the fact that my goal is to be constructive rather than insulting:
  • Not having internet at the arena was a huge issue for our team, as our entire scouting system relies on internet access to get to our database. Tethering phones is not a good enough solution. I understand that it is a convention center, but at the Fingerlakes regional, the planning committee provides the teams with a temproray login to the RIT network. I feel like a similar thing could be planned for, with a team login to to the convention center net. In the future, we will be checking at regionals for those that have internet, and not attending those that don't.
  • On the same subject, the lack of power in the stands was an inconvenience, but definitely understandable, because there really was no way to provide power to them.
  • The refs missed or made the wrong call a more than a few times. There was an incident where, during a double balance, one of the robots fell off and was touching the barrier. Instead of counting the bots as none balanced, the team got 10 points for the one robot fully supported. We also noticed quite a few instances of robots possessing 4 balls that were not penalized. That said, the crew was great and overall did a fantastic job all weekend.

In the neutral category, does anyone know why there were three field faults called over the course of the event? They replayed two qualification matches and a semifinal, even though it seemed to me that all robots were functional in that semifinal. Also, we noticed 1218 intermittently losing connection during the last final match. I wonder why a fault wasn't called on that one when there was such a history of them being called before?

And a couple fantastic things that we loved about the planning of the event:
  • The pit layout was positively fantastic. Instead of simple rows of teams, the aisles made moving through the pits an absolute dream. This is even more essential at the 60+ team events like DC, and it was absolutely nailed.
  • The advent of that "teams inspected" projector was one of the best ideas I have ever seen. It's only only useful to see where your team is in the inspection process, but it was also incredibly useful for us to see that during our first match of the day on Friday, we were partnered with an uninspected robot, and though we tried to get them inspected as quickly as possible (They didn't have a set of red bumpers, so we taped some blue cloth red), we didn't make it in time. So we knew to tell them to send a player to the field, but not to interact with anything, and no DQ's were given.
  • All the teams in DC were great, and it was really fun to help and compete with you guys. In particular, we enjoyed helping 4067 with their rookie machine, they were really having some bum luck. Also, our pit kinda became a hotspot for other teams programmers, which was really fun, and made our programming team feel really good.

Onwards to St. Louis! We hope to see everyone who qualified in DC in a few weeks!