[Dan Richardson]

Team 1902 had a great time at the Florida Regional. Our team only being formed 9 weeks ago was worried about what may happen at the regional, but we worked hard and were able to accomplish a lot with very little.

Thursday things were looking down for us, our IFI wheels were behaving poorly mechanicaly, and we had to replace 2 of the 6 of them with skyways. But on the positive note we ran a very succesful automode.

Again the problem continued with the wheels on friday we had a 2-4 day which was somewhat dissapointing and we went to bed that night feeling somewhat discouraged.

Saturday we came in determined and rearing to go, we thought we had most of the chain problems temporarily worked out. ( we knew we would have to replace the ifi wheels with something later, the solution is treaded skyway wheels ) It worked brilliantly we won our first 3 matches of the day and we were being heavily scouted for finals matches. RIght before the finals matches we discovered one last problem. We had been running both days with only 1 motor on each side into a 2 motor drive! Some wiring had come undone ( maybe in ship ) or who knows but it was backdriving a motor the entire time. We fixed it right before our finals and boy was it glorious to see our robot fly around the field. We were picked by 357 Royal Assault and 1523 Mars to work with them during the finals. We worked great knocking off the 4 and 1 seeds making it all the way to the finals! In the finals we worked well until getting into a pushing match with 79 we lost one of our chains then quickly we noticed that there was a HUGE Issue. One of the IFI wheels we were using in the middle had split completely open on one side. We pulled 2 chains off the front of the 6 wheel drive trying to lesson the load for the last match, but we were unseccesful. Our autonomous ran again flawlessly because the gyro compensated for the drive, but the wheels just feel apart and it was very unfortunate that we would break in the finals.

But we were overwhelmed with excitement either way, no way in our wildest dreams did we figure we would be in finals at the Florida Regional. We couldn't have lost to a better alliance too and SPAM our cheering partners were great, Krunch and 1649. You guys would have extrordinarily hard to take down even with a 100% perfect functioning robot.

Winning Rookie Allstar, Rookie Inspiration and Finalist really made the hardwork worth it. It inspired a lot of our students and even more importantly the school and sponsors we work with. Hopefully we'll get to see everyone again at nationals if we raise the money in time, and we can't wait for the Houston Regional.