Nightmare Repairs At Competition

[BrendanB]

During Week 6 at the Pine Tree Regional after two days of no hiccups with our autonomous 30 point climber our team struck horror in the quarterfinals.

During qf1.1 when our team went to climb at 30 seconds left in the game we lifted to level one just fine but our arm that lifts the hooks to the second bar stayed on bar one without rising to level two. Our team tested the system in our pit and it worked fine. We did however find a lose power connection to our climber and a questionable battery. Problem was assumed as a power issue.

During qf1.2 the same problem happened as the arm still wouldn't move from level one. We noticed our cable was unspooled meaning the arm should have been expanded but it was jammed on the bar. Back in the pits we noticed our pawls had come loose so when we hung the hooks became jammed on the bar due to the pawls being crooked. All caused by a collision in qf1.1.

Our team tightened everything down and ran to the practice field to test climbing. The arm worked fine but the winch was out of whack. As our team was getting qued for the semis we noticed our encoder had been knocked out of alignment and damaged. What ensued was the scariest 15 minutes of the weekend as both the competition and practice climber were taken apart to switch encoders. Thankfully one of the quarter finals went to 3 matches giving us some more time for surgery.

Once the new encoder was on we had no issues for the semis and finals!