Quote:
Originally Posted by jspatz1
Not playing in a walk-in freezer definitely helped! Anytime you have the chance to reflect on your mistakes and the nature of the game for couple of weeks, you are likely to adjust and fix things and play at a higher level the next time, that is true for any team. There were definitely some strategic things that we were able to say "that didn't work" for CIR, and some things things that we said "we should do that more" for KC. As for the robot, we made a significant overhaul of the drivetrain, which helped our defensive play. Also a complete re-write of the 2-ball autonomous. It hardly ever hit at CIR, and hardly ever missed at GKC, so that work paid off. We have a couple of other tweaks for Champs.
|
I know exactly what you mean! That temperature difference shredded our shot performance to where we didn't find our tension sweet spot to compensate until CIR elims...which was just a bit too late. Even then, our confidence in it was lower because of how quickly that performance would always shift. Frustratingly, that took both our hot goal auto off the table as well as our 2 ball. We tried a 2 ball re-write on the fly at CIR and we actually had it working on the practice field right before elims...too bad we forgot to check the state of the battery we were using when we tuned it before we used it on the field. Massive face palm moment for sure. With that temperature difference no longer in play, our performance was much better at Wisconsin. Our shot performance returned to what we were initially expecting for CIR and that thankfully put both our hot goal and 2 ball autos back in play. It also allowed us to be quicker getting shots up and far more elusive and unpredictable on the field.
We also took a lot of time to analyze what we saw in our matches in week 1 as well as watch things other teams have tried in competitions to see what we could adjust for Wisconsin. We're going through the same process to prepare for championships, as well. Natural progression through experience and always striving to improve based off what you've learned. Similarly, we also made an adjustment to our drive train from week 1. We geared things down slightly to improve our acceleration and up our pushing power to help with defense - both playing it and negating it. We also added in some control functions to give our drivers a few more options to work with in utilizing the swerve drive. We've got a couple more ideas we hope to implement for St. Louis, as well. Just continue to add to that toy box.
Best of luck to you guys at championships and with any luck we'll be able to hook up on that field again in St. Louis!