[sciguy125]

This regional was a little upsetting for 1351. We fought hard and made it to first seed. Then, about 20 mins before our quarter final match, we had a speed controller fry. We didn't have enough time to fix it and went in with the left drive dead.

The really disappointing part was that we have two motors per side and only one died. We might have been alright had the second motor worked. However, it looks like we accidentally unplugged/dislodged/otherwise caused to fail the signal cable from the other speed controller while we were trying to replace the dead one. There were other problems associated with our hasty swap job, but those mentioned were the direct causes of the failure.

We lost both of the quarter final matches and were out. Thanks to 649 and 100 for sticking through it with us anyway.

FOR THE RECORD:
It seems that we had 4 separate teams come to our pit and comment on our robot's remarkable similarity to 254's. We did not work with them, ours was developed completely independently. We didn't see their design until they released pictures from the Portland regional, so we didn't have time to copy it either. I was actually pretty shocked when I noticed that we pretty much have the same robot, functionally anyway. And as for copying their strategy too, we had the idea on kick off day. The robot was designed with the "shoot from the platform" attack in mind. The reason we didn't impliment it at Silicon Valley is that we were having some drivetrain issues that made it hard to get up the ramp. Again, we are not a cheap knockoff of 254. We independently designed a similar, but shoddy version of their robot.