[dtengineering]

Well, it doesn't go down as my favourite robot... but my favourite arm definitely belonged to 1690... and I never even noticed it until it received the "Tommorrow's Technology" award.

My favorite bot without an arm was 1318's little purple lap bot, but I'm probably biased there because I saw it go from not working so well in Portland to knocking us out of the eliminations in Seattle to running hot laps in Atlanta. It was certainly a unique design and took a lot of work to get it running right.

118 rates high in the "bling" category. Others who have seen that drive train in person as it has been developed the past few years might not be nearly as impressed... but wow. That robot wins my vote for the "most insanely complex machine" award, but it was finished up so nicely that the team really made it look easy to design and build something like that.

But overall this wasn't a complex game... in fact, it was a very simple game. And the team and robot that mastered simplicity... the one that I had been cheering for since I saw their first matches on the Blue Alliance... and the one that brought it all home... was 1114. What I specifically loved about that machine was that any well-equipped FRC team could have built it... if they had thought of it. Maybe not to quite the same level of programming, practice and polish that 1114 did... but there really wasn't anything quite like it anywhere else.

Jason