The 2013 Granite State Regional + some time.
Our team bit of way more then we could pull off aiming much higher than our previous years. We had grown a lot both in resources, students, and mentors and our design reflected it. Growing pains as we call them!
When we bagged our robot we had a drivebase, barely an electronics board, a shooter, a disc storage system that had been made that week, and a 30 point climber that had worked good during testing but needed more time to improve. We kept the shooter and disc manipulation system off as our withholding allowance to finish them. The week leading up to GSR was exhausting as we rushed to finish our practice robot and work on our disc manipulation system and shooter. I remember driving to Manchester on Wednesday to drop the bagged robot and tools off which our programming team was just starting autonomous/shooting control.
Thursday of the regional we spent most of the day ripping the bagged robot apart to rebuild after we made discoveries with our practice robot. What took the longest was our shooter was on slides to raise up and down to overcome defensive blocking. Our climber was mounted to the side and would swing out over the platform so we were climbing above our center of gravity. By the end of the day we had an inspected robot but no time to debug the systems as a whole. Additionally we found our climber and shooter interfered with each other by 1/2in when the climber swung out. With the shooter system not working up to par we took if off first thing Friday morning so we could at least climb. Due to all of the rebuilding there were technical glitches popping up everywhere but our pit crew kept working through every hurdle even though the entire team was running off of exhaustion from the past 3 weeks. We finished the weekend as quarterfinalists with 2791 and 78.
While it is an experience everyone on our team would prefer to forget it was a very powerful weekend and was a time every team needs to go through. Our team was young but we were learning how to take our team from the rookies that kept it simple to the veterans who aimed much higher.
In the following weeks our team grew much stronger as we looked forward to our week 6 event in Maine. We had kept every mechanism in the bag at GSR not knowing what would stay and what go but all we knew was we had to redesign. The programmers worked diligently with our practice arm to speed up climbing from 50 seconds to 20 seconds. The mechanical team worked on some bucket hopper prototypes and repackaged our mechanisms by placing the climber on top the shooter with a simple pivot system replacing a complex lead screw. Luckily for us our entire upgrades only required 28lbs of prefabricated materials as most of our new robot was already in the bag.
At the Pine Tree Regional we took our robot down the drivebase and worked our way up making a new electronics board, modified our climber, and mounted the new shooter assembly. All this and inspection was completed by 1pm. I never thought more then 8 people could work effectively in a 10x10 pit but boy was I wrong. Our new robot did have some technical problems but our pit crew powered through and after 13 long elimination matches we were the 2nd seed (12-1) with a robot that could shoot 3 in autonomous, 4 cycles, and then climb for 30. We were selected by the number 1 seed 2648 and 2386 rounded out our alliance.
The rest of our 2013 season is history and while it was the longest build/competition season of my life our team has never been prouder of what we accomplished!
Below are two photos one of our original robot at the Granite State Regional on Thursday and one of our robot later in the season.
GSR:
http://i.imgur.com/mny2Q2n.jpg?1
Now:
http://i.imgur.com/IGE6jY8.jpg?1