[some edits] also please don't reply if you won't read it all some people are getting the wrong impression by only reading one or two choice sentences.
Last year we were rookies but that didn't stop us from aiming high. We had some great ideas and worked our butts off. The end result was a very good bot that we were proud of, it was an extraordinary accomplishment for our rookie year.
We went to St. Louis and with a bit of luck we won. We were all excited and we left for Nationals. We liked kicking butt and we almost expected to do a little of the same there. After a few matches we quickly found out that its an entirely new game there. To stay competitive you need to be fast, really fast. Unfortunately we were not. We got our butts kicked there but we gained a lot of experience and now knew the differences between a "St. Louis" bot and an "Atlanta" bot.
This year we applied everything we learned from last year to the new bot. We recruited and trained some new freshmen and doubled our team size. We worked our butts off even more. Almost all days we worked from after school (3:00) to past 10:00. We were not fortunate enough to have rich sponsors that could CNC our parts for us. We had to make up for that in manpower. It takes a long time to machine parts down and it really sucks if you go a .001" too far and a bearing or some other part will no longer fit.
This year the build process did not go as smoothly as it did last year. We actually had to change our whole shooter concept 1/2 way through as a prototype showed it would not work. We were also striving for less mentor involvement and more student involvement. Students were now heading the build teams and not the mentors. I headed the "ball handling" team this year and I found just how convenient having mentors to do everything for you is, and found that I couldn't expect them to continue doing that anymore. For a while We even had doubts the robot wouldn't get finished. This put us in "rush mode" and thankfully we were able to put a finished robot into the box
Also thankfully we had a few days to test and program. We were happy to find out that our robot rocked
. We knew then we had succeeded in building an "Atlanta" bot.
We shipped our robot and excitedly waited for regional to come. We all saw the VCU web cast and happily found out that our robot could take on any one of them. We were even more excited for St. Louis
Well we got to St. Louis and had a streak of bad luck. Nothing was working. The camera was unreliable and our robot was just not living up to its potential.
During the practice rounds people started complaining about the speed of our shooter. They did not like our "Atlanta" shooter at St. Louis. One of the safety inspectors had us test the speed every hour. By the end of the day he had us lower the speed so much that we had to let our shooter spin up for about a minute to shoot ONE ball. Under game like conditions we could plop out a ball four feet at most. Thankfully the other safety inspector had a little more sense and let us put our motor speed back up as one shot does not represent gameplay. Our shooter doesn't get full juice during a match, and we dont wait untill the match is over to spin up our wheel to full speed.
The next day we still had problems. We lost our first two matches. The second match left us with a destroyed shooter. Team moral was low but we didn't give up. We put forward a huge team effort to fixe the shooter and got it back in shape for the next round.
Thankfully we won the next round and had a nice boost to our moral. Our autonomous mode was not working at all and we were almost about to just drop it. Thankfully we gave it a second chance. We uploaded our "as shipped" code into it and crossed our fingers in the next match. We got 6 out of 10 balls in, not bad
Well here is when our bad luck seemed to end. We won the rest of our matches with huge margins (so much that are ranking points were looking depressing). We cheered as our shooter jammed the goals with balls. A ref had to be constantly poking our goal with a stick
. We also set the the high scores of 95 and 99. We could have easily gone for triple digits but we held back. Slaughtering teams isn't exactly the spirit of FIRST
Our eyes were set for Atlanta when we entered the finals. We got the schedule for the 1st round. We were up against a low shooter another low shooter that was a decent blocker, and a robot whose strategy it looked like was aggressively ramming and tipping over robots.
We get to the field and were greeted with a not so friendly announcement. "We have change the frequencies of the lights, make sure you get the new numbers" Thanks...
So we cant score autonomous because they changed the light and also two robots are aimed out our robot. During the match all three opposing robots rammed/pinned us. But thankfully one of our teammates save our bacon with a well timed volley of balls. the next matches there was more and more rough play until finally at the end of the last match all three of our robots were on the ground at the end of the match. No penalties were called. BTW none of our robots were tippy. The last match we should have won autonomous but one of our balls wasn't counted. It would have won us the match.
Such a sudden stop to our hopes to return to Atlanta is a disapointment. It is only human
It seems that many of you guys are dismissing my thread as a childish rant because of a few poorly worded sentences in my post. Many of you don't even bother to see our point of view
To say that you would not show ANY disapointment if you went through a sitiation like we did then you are flat out lieing to yourself.
Secondly somepeople are being quick to asume that we are whining because we didn't win and that we think is all that matters. Read my post again you will find out that I have told about many of the ups and downs and great experiences that we have had. NONE of us regrets ever being in FIRST. We have all had AWESOME memories going through this program.
My disapointment mostly comes from that in my opinion there was too much rough play and "battle bots". I was just hoping that I could explain some of the frustrations that we have had and that next year there will be less "battle bots." Is that a bad thing to ask for?
I'm sorry to those that have found any of my posts offensive. It was not my intention.