You never know what can happen at a FIRST event...

[eovnu87435ds]

This past Saturday was a local Off-Season Competition called Duel on the Deleware, hosted by teams 365 Moe and 316 Lunatecs. It is a low-key competition with about 30 teams from the NJ-DE-PA area, but still gets just as hectic as any other event. In addition, they modified the rules that you can even place the ubertube after autonomous mode and still get the 2x bonus.

Now I am a college freshman, who was past president of team 87- Diablo. Throughout the years, I have found ways to analyze the games and the teams who play in the games. By my senior year, I could predict what types of robots other teams would build, how they would play the game, and could even predict scores and, alliances, and finalists, with great accuracy. Until this Saturday, I thought I had seen it all.

This past Saturday, however, I think I am beginning to second-guess myself.

We arrived at the competition, and had one successful practice match. Then the trouble started... our drivetrain was destroying itself! We have nylon idler gears placed on a custom chain tensioner to keep our chains tight, but they got tweaked, and caused the chains to jump, tear up the idlers, and break the chain. And each time we thought we fixed it, it broke again. For every single qualifier match, we were dead in the water, with a robot that couldn't move. Throughout the entire qualifier, we scored 1 point(one match, the chain didn't break until after autonomous).

When parents asked me what would happen next, I had to tell them the truth. Who would pick a broken robot for their alliance?

This is where the story starts to make no sense. While we are packing up, we suddenly hear 87 called on the loudspeaker... We all turn in shock and amazement. We get called to join the alliance with 365 Moe and 1640 SaBOTage. Our jaws drop in amazement as our representative walks up and accepts.

Now, I don't know if this was a smart move or a dumb one on Moe's part. When we asked why Moe picked us, they replied that they didn't want to see a repeat of the 2011 Philadelphia Regional(where we were called in as a replacement bot against Moe, and put up one hell of a fight, where we ended up losing by just 4 points, 59-63, by successfully and legally stopping moe from deploying their ultra-fast minibot). Either they didn't realize we never worked, or they were afraid of us coming back again(we did end up placing 16th that day)

To make things even crazier, we ended up machining new idler gears in the hosting college's machine shop, and fixing our tweaked drivetrain and became driveable! We worked every match up until the finals. We played 3 final matches. It was our alliance against 341 daisy, 816 westek, and 339. I came up with a stragety for the first match that surely would catch them off guard. us and 1640 would play bot-on-bot defense against 816 and 341, the team's main scoring bots. That would leave the game down to 365 just being able to out-score 339. For it to work, Moe was going to do it's typical autonomous where it would place 2 ubertubes. to make it easier for them to get the 3rd from us, we left it behind our bot. This way at the start of autonomous we could immediately go block daisy and westek. Apparently, by not loading our tube, we tipped our hand, and the match started with daisy rushing our side and stealing our ubertube to place on their wall! this resulted in pandemonium on the field and a win for alliance daisy.

The next match we chose a simpler strategy, where 1640 and 365 scored and we played zone defense. but our bot stops running. COM problems, yet the FMS sees no issue. For the next 10 minutes, with the bot on the field, our team, mentors, and FRC techs try to diagnose and resolve the problem. No luck. We couldn't even get it to run while tethering it. We were about to give up when we hear that out of the blue that our alliance had somehow won! this made the score 1-1. next round wins the competition. The downside: our robot still does not work! after some more testing, we are told that we have no choice but to put everything back together and hope it works next match.

Nobody would have thought it would magically work next match, but it did! and we ended up winning the match, and the event!


Even now, we don't know what caused the issues we were having, but now we also don't care, as we are done competing with this robot.

So if anybody happened to read this whole post, you must be wondering why I posted it. Well, I did for 2 reasons. The first is to thank all those who helped us gain our first ever win since 2004, and our second win since the team's creation in 1996.
The second, and the most important, is that you should never give up on yourself or your team. You never know what's going to happen, especially in a FIRST event!

[Ankit S.]

Great story, and great job you guys!

It really cements the fact that it isn't over until its over!

[Libby K]

What a great story.

100% right. You never know what can happen!

Thanks for making me smile, guys. This is one of the zillion reasons why I love FIRST.

And this is the result, of FIRST robotics. I'm glad you wrote your story. It was not only entertaining, but it also taught the readers something extremely valuable.

Whoever may see this, take a minute or so and read the story. It's well worth it.

[Frenchie461]

Awesome story, this goes up there with 228 in 2010 rebuilding a swerve drive in one day because of bad bearings.