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Unread 26-07-2010, 13:26
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Taylor Taylor is offline
Professor of Thinkology, ThD
AKA: @taylorstem
FRC #3487 (Red Pride Robotics)
Team Role: Teacher
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Rookie Year: 2006
Location: Indianapolis, IN, USA 46227
Posts: 4,604
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Re: 2010 IRI Results and Awards

As the coach of a team that was likely viewed as a "how-did-they-get-here," I feel I must speak up on my team's behalf.

I haven't looked at the official rankings, but if we weren't last, I'd be terribly surprised. Here's why:
On Thursday several members of the team were at LNHS to help setting up the field and pit area for our 6th IRI. It was a hot July Indiana day, there were no outside windows around, and honestly our thoughts never really turned to weather. I have no idea how long the rain pelted our robot sitting in the back of a pickup truck. All I know is we went outside to get our pit installed and saw the wrath of God coming from above.

We took off and apart all jaguars, victors, and servos and dried them overnight, we changed out the PDB and sidecar (rewiring a robot on Friday morning is no small task, especially when you're in the first match), we re-lubed the gearboxes, but still were having communication problems, mostly on the field that we couldn't duplicate in our pit. Two matches, the robot spent the teleop period rebooting. One match, we had about a 2.5-second delay between sending the drive signals and the robot operations responding. One match, a freshly-charged battery read less than 8 volts (we hooked up a multimeter to it after the match and found it really still had >12V). One match, the entire left side of the robot refused to work.

I've really got to hand it to the students - despite all these setbacks, most of which we couldn't replicate outside of matchplay - they kept their heads up, they kept troubleshooting, and on Saturday our alliances won both matches to bring our final record to 3-5.

When the planning committee extended an invitation to our team, I'm fairly sure they didn't expect to get a waterlogged robot on Thursday.

As far as the call for more midwest offseason events, I submit to you CAGE Match - October 16.

I'm certain the folks that run IRI, and have done it for 10 years now, are much smarter than I am, and it is not my place to question their methods. Obviously they're doing something right.
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