I've been in this competition for four years--three with 1293, and now one with 1618. Each year, there's always been some critical design flaw that's kept my team back. Window motor drive, hard-to-control casters, a shooter that just couldn't shoot, it wasn't working out one way or the other.
This season, Uppercut had its flaws--but we made all the right design choices. Of the twelve matches we played at Palmetto (10 qualifying, 2 elimination), we tipped twice (it happens), lost power once (and I can't even blame this one on the Rockwell block, the way our tower was shaking around), and lost five of the sprocket screws on our center wheel, causing us to be out for a match and a half.
Now, you may call not being able to finish five of twelve matches a high rate of success, but the problems we had were largely because of a lack of a good pre-match checklist. When we lost wheel screws, it became one of the kids' job to check every single nut on the wheels (all 36, critical ones swapped with locknuts) before each match. When the tower bucked around, causing the wire to the battery to pull out of the Rockwell block (
YouTube)...well, it would've become a checklist item. (We got knocked out by the 1251/1626/1758 alliance after that match.)
Still, we had one of the fastest things on six wheels at Palmetto, and it didn't just drive its way into the Palmetto quarterfinals--it did it as an alliance captain, something no active team in the area has ever done before. Put it all together, and Uppercut is definitely the best robot I've had a hand in (and it's fast growing on me as the favorite, too).
Oh, and the arm almost works now. What'll we do with it? Well, it'll hopefully involve going north or south by a few states.
