[BrendanB]

1058's tougher times this year:

Reading Match 1

Our climber is a double linkage designed so the gas shocks keep it down before a piston pushes them past the center point so they take over and extend up. We some drop tests and drive tests over defenses and it worked fine. First match in autonomous the climber extends upwards after driving over the rockwall and we all had this moment of, "This is very bad". The root cause was a knot of surgical tubing was preventing the assembly from collapsing all the way. We adjusted the knot, added a small strip of painters tape as a temporary fix, and added a piston lock as a permament solution for the rest of the season. We also destroyed about 8 halves of the AM 6" Pnuematic Tire Hubs over the course of the event. We had plenty of spares but we knew we had to start making our own hubs asap. This meant our addition of a shooter was delayed by an event so we were testing and tuning it during the New England Championship.

Any match on Caver

Our robot had about 80 official matches on it by the time St. Louis rolled around. We added our working shooter at the previous event and made a better intake for Champs hoping to see our cycling improve. Little did we know most of our matches there had some major failure or breakdown leaving us disabled or limping on the field. The plates holding our gearboxes had bent into the robot so we threw the gearbox chains the first match. Our climber had be used so much that after we scaled the tower the hook snapped and sent the robot the ground. We sheared the bolts on our metal hubs. Our pnuematic system acted funny so one or two shots barely lifted the ball out of the robot. We had some miscommunication on changing some autonomous modes (completely my fault) so we didn't fully cross some defenses. We had some odd electrical problems leading to brownouts. It was a rough event knowing we had potential to do so much more but it was the point where Stronghold was getting the better of our robot.

Mainely Spirit

We had some odd pnuematics issues later in the day where near the end of each match we had no air left in our system but once we enabled in the pit the compressor turned on immediately. When we got home we diagnosed the compressor was shot. After the fourth or fifth cycle of needing air it refused to turn on even with a signal from the PCM.

Stronghold is the hardest game I've played and I'm amazed how well our machine has held up over 136 matches plus practice and demos.