[DougHogg]

There were some amazing ball machines out there. Out here on the west coast, we didn't see that many, but at the Championships, we were very impressed.

We are a rookie team and, at the risk of being immodest, I think we had the best rookie ball machine. (We won the Rookie All-Star Award at the Los Angeles Regional.) If you know of any other good rookie ball machines, please post the info.

Below is the link to a short clip of our robot picking up 9 balls (which is all we could find at our school) in 3 seconds. We could handle about 16 in actual competition. If we picked up more, our pneumatics needed some robot shaking to help get the basket up.

Our major weak point was probably speed. We were nervous about changing to high gear because sudden turns tended to blow fuses, so we stayed in low gear. Hey, next year, we are going to ...

By the way, we competed against Team 86 and Team 1 in the Einstein Division match 64, and Team 86 was awesome at getting balls. Their alliance had us beat but decided to go for 2 more balls. Then for some reason, they didn't make it back to their home zone, and we won 43 to 42. So to Team 86, you guys deserved that one. (Of course we gave one away ourselves by not just raising our basket again to dump a ball that stayed in our basket. We lost by ... one ball, and would have won the tie if we had dumped that ball. Live and learn. Yes I know, I posted about that before but ...)

Short Clip: http://home.pacbell.net/pinewood/mov...DayShortSm.mov