[FRCGameSense] Episode 5 with Aaron Bailey!

[Alpha Beta]

Really enjoyed the broadcast last night. The GameSense crew is a lot of fun to work with. Relaxed and good natured while maintaining a sense of professionalism that is much appreciated. They put a lot of work in behind the scenes to pull off a fantastic show each week.

Cast Update:
4522 just Ninja-ed their way into the Oklahoma tournament this morning after 4102 apparently dropped off the list. They were a controversial finish away from winning the Arkansas Regional, top contenders in Kansas City, and should make some significant noise this weekend. Needless to say, my Oklahoma predictions on the broadcast last night just took a serious hit.

It will be fun to watch 4522 and 1024 in Queen City to see if either of these late entrants can win their way to champs. Worked out pretty well for 1477 last year. (1625 in 2008 as well).

It does bring up the reminder that while FIRST officially closed registration on December 5th, 2013... Teams are still finding ways in.

[Johnbot]

Great video! (I think FRC Game Sense will take Psych's place as what I spend my Wednesday nights watching.)

And Evan shouldn't feel compelled to apologize to us - we were ecstatic about your prediction that we'd be picked by our good friend 1218.

[jspatz1]

Originally Posted by barn34

From the looks of it on video, you guys were impressively hitting an even higher performance gear in week 3. Other than not being in the "snow globe", did you guys make any significant adjustments after CIR or was it a lot of natural progression? I know for us, not being in that frigid dome did wonders when we unbagged in Milwaukee. It was like someone stole the robot we bagged at the end of build season and replaced it with an imposter for week 1. Thankfully, that nightmare has ended.

Not playing in a walk-in freezer definitely helped! Anytime you have the chance to reflect on your mistakes and the nature of the game for couple of weeks, you are likely to adjust and fix things and play at a higher level the next time, that is true for any team. There were definitely some strategic things that we were able to say "that didn't work" for CIR, and some things things that we said "we should do that more" for KC. As for the robot, we made a significant overhaul of the drivetrain, which helped our defensive play. Also a complete re-write of the 2-ball autonomous. It hardly ever hit at CIR, and hardly ever missed at GKC, so that work paid off. We have a couple of other tweaks for Champs.

[barn34]

Originally Posted by jspatz1

Not playing in a walk-in freezer definitely helped! Anytime you have the chance to reflect on your mistakes and the nature of the game for couple of weeks, you are likely to adjust and fix things and play at a higher level the next time, that is true for any team. There were definitely some strategic things that we were able to say "that didn't work" for CIR, and some things things that we said "we should do that more" for KC. As for the robot, we made a significant overhaul of the drivetrain, which helped our defensive play. Also a complete re-write of the 2-ball autonomous. It hardly ever hit at CIR, and hardly ever missed at GKC, so that work paid off. We have a couple of other tweaks for Champs.

I know exactly what you mean! That temperature difference shredded our shot performance to where we didn't find our tension sweet spot to compensate until CIR elims...which was just a bit too late. Even then, our confidence in it was lower because of how quickly that performance would always shift. Frustratingly, that took both our hot goal auto off the table as well as our 2 ball. We tried a 2 ball re-write on the fly at CIR and we actually had it working on the practice field right before elims...too bad we forgot to check the state of the battery we were using when we tuned it before we used it on the field. Massive face palm moment for sure. With that temperature difference no longer in play, our performance was much better at Wisconsin. Our shot performance returned to what we were initially expecting for CIR and that thankfully put both our hot goal and 2 ball autos back in play. It also allowed us to be quicker getting shots up and far more elusive and unpredictable on the field.

We also took a lot of time to analyze what we saw in our matches in week 1 as well as watch things other teams have tried in competitions to see what we could adjust for Wisconsin. We're going through the same process to prepare for championships, as well. Natural progression through experience and always striving to improve based off what you've learned. Similarly, we also made an adjustment to our drive train from week 1. We geared things down slightly to improve our acceleration and up our pushing power to help with defense - both playing it and negating it. We also added in some control functions to give our drivers a few more options to work with in utilizing the swerve drive. We've got a couple more ideas we hope to implement for St. Louis, as well. Just continue to add to that toy box.

Best of luck to you guys at championships and with any luck we'll be able to hook up on that field again in St. Louis!