[the.miler]

Team 846 had a wonderful time at the Boston Regional. Every year, we attend an away event (generally on the East Coast) and Silicon Valley Regional, which gives us a chance to travel to cool places and compete with different teams.

This event definitely ranks as the best in recent memory for us. Boston Regional was an incredibly well run event, and the volunteers, field staff, judges, and event coordinators were absolutely phenomenal. Especially the queue staff, who dealt with us always just barely slipping in on time; thank you for putting up with us. Also, the MC's made every match interesting, and we loved your introductions during the finals as well as those funny award poem (bunch of rhyming words) announcements. You guys are cool.

We felt welcomed by everyone both at the event as well as everywhere in Boston, and that was special. Thank you all so much.

Over the course of the event, we managed to go from a complete overhaul of our machine to scoring all of our autonomous discs and 3+ loads of four frisbees in the top goal by the end of the qualification matches. We were incredibly fortunate to be ranked 3rd and select our incredible alliance partners, 3173 and 88.

3173 is a monster scorer from the feeder station, and we were stoked to be able to pick you guys and planned to pick up whatever you missed on the floor and score those discs. We did not expect 88 to slip to us, but when they did we were incredibly happy to be able to select you, as an outstanding climber.

Of course, the eliminations did not play out as many people expected; here's the explanation. Our robot experienced significant electrical and CAN issues, which deprived us of the ability to use our ground pickup and eventually our shooter. We manage to smoke a drive CIM, which almost removed the last thing we had - our drivetrain, which is geared for 15.7 ft/sec. So, we switched to keeping 3173's path clear, countering the defense played by 1100 and 1511. We had never played defense before. In doing so, we played our first finals matches at a regional in our team's history, as 3173 just kept pumping those frisbees in and 88 got that spectacular 50 pt climb/dump on. Thank you guys for helping us get so far. Hopefully we will have our issues resolved by SVR; we ripped off the suspect components of our robot and are debugging as I type this.

We were also very honored that the judges acknowledged our efforts to generate excitement about FIRST with the Engineering Inspiration Award. Our web team wants to see even more views on BecauseRobots.org, so make sure to visit and possibly submit a photo of yourself for the banner telling us why you think robots are cool!

Thanks for a great time, Boston. Congratulations to 125, 126, and 1511 on a well deserved victory. We were honored to shake your hands and be on the other side of the glass. We hope to see you all in St. Louis, though we are still debating on whether we can attend.