[Dmentor]

My DC Random Walk:

1. The inaugural DC event was an awesome time to bump into VIPs and all around cool people associated with FIRST. Senator John Kerry took time to address us during Friday’s opening ceremony. And while I never did manage to catch up to Dean Kamen to thank him personally for creating an awesome opportunity to share my love of engineering with the students, our team did get him to sign our OI!! I’m sure we’ll treasure it long after we’ve reduced this years’ robot to scrap.

2. We worked with lots of great teams through qualifications and got two really great alliance partners for the elimination rounds: 1712 and 176! We had some nail-biter matches with three other great teams in the elimination quarterfinals (339, 365, 116) and were fortunate to squeak by. It is never much fun to lose, but if we had to pick an alliance to lose to 45/234/620 is a good one. These teams are class acts. I really enjoyed chatting with Andy Baker over the last couple days. As I’m sure so many across FIRST have realized he is truly a gem!

3. I believe in miracles! At one point on Thursday, I think I noted a MOE representative in nearly every rookie pit. Loads of other teams also chipped in and teams were literally racing each other to fill part requests from other teams. Several members of our team adopted 2961 and we were so proud of our adopted team when they finally we able to get out there and show their stuff. Unfortunately we added one to their loss column. Hopefully we can continue a lasting relationship with 2961 and many of the other teams we met at DC!

4. Little things can potentially make a big difference… Match 58 – our head to head with 45 in the qualifications (both were 5-0 at the time). We figured we had to win this one since we suspected 45/234 would pair up if possible (both are excellent independently but together… ouch!). Unfortunately this turned out to be the one match where a silly little mistake caused us major headaches. Root cause? Our software has (very soon to be “had”) two different ways to toggle between arcade and tank mode (a residual from our driver selection qualifications); this leads to an odd exclusive-OR logic. For some reason, karma maybe, one of the toggles was accidentally enabled without the driver being aware and so when he thought he was toggling on tank mode he was actually toggling it off. Not realizing the problem, he was unable to turn effectively (ie. not at all or unpredictably) and so we had the double whammy of not being able to score and being a sitting duck. Attention to the smallest detail is so fundamental to winning reliably in FIRST…

I could go on and on with observations I’ve seen over the last few days but I think it is time to catch up on a little sleep. Thanks for the awesome memories at DC and best wishes to all the teams at their upcoming regionals/championship!