Apology from 612 @VCU, & also congrats...

[LeeD]

The Apology...
Just wanted to say sorry to some of the robot's Team 612 flipped =/

The 'wedge' (aka snow plow by the announer), wasn't designed for 'flipping' robots, in fact, when we used the wedge it lifts our front wheels off the ground slightly...

few misunderstandings I heard from teams:
1) We never intentionally flipped, I think we flipped 3 or 4 teams during autonomous mode over the course of the 3 days.. Also note that all flips during autonomous mode were with the -wedge up- so we didn't go under wheel bases with it.. and of the 1 or 2 that flipped under user control, none flipped due to the -wedge-, but because of their high center of gravity, and wheel base.. one of them rode up our back piece of bosch aluminum and flipped themselves, and i think we flipped another but I was always running around so I didn't see it =p
2) We had a nastily mean drive system, combined with a low center of gravity, we just seemed to have the power and height, with combination of low center of gravity, to tip a top-heavy robot over on the ramp during autonomous.


We never meant to flip so many robot's, our goal was to 1) Not be flipped, 2) Not be pushed, and 3) Intimidate.

Our drive system + wedge assured we'd fill those objectives...




The Congrats
On another Note.. VCU was -great!- We walked in there with no wedge(you may have noticed, practice round #1 we looked like one of the weakest robots on the field for practices)

By the 2nd match we had a 75% functional/reliable robot, and by the 4th competition match we were at 125%...

Fighting sparky(team 384) finally was a good fight, unfortunatly our operator & mentor didnt think we needed the wedge down against ya, and we didn't wanna flip people, unfortunatly we didn't push you to the other side of the field like i would have when time was running out =p Good job smacking the stack...


The competition was full of suprises, and I must admit choosing an alliance partner was a fun challenge, we had more then half the top 8 teams asking us for an alliance, and we were ranked ~16th


only 2 problems I had with the competition, which were, for the most part, made up for by the fun of competing and seeing all the awsome robots..
1) Wish we went with sparky for finals!!
2) Wish the 'penalty' for partnering with a non-functional team wasnt so high, over half our matches were almost 2 on 1



Well, in the end it was worth it, and I'll be driving for 4 hours every weekend(each way) next year from college to mentor my home town team... The FIRST competition is GREAT(overall), and it was a fun experience


Did Sparkey have any mechanical problems ya had to fix between fights?
I know our bot, once the wedge was tweaked and working, only really had physical damage to our wire mesh(protecting the electronics), and we had a wire(front left motor wire) that constantly became un-sodered at the end of the later matches due to the heat generated when we were pushing people I think, luckily our back motor's never went out (they are torqued up soo much we wouldnt move, pushed by other robots or pulling of the other motors)


Congrats to all the Semi-finalists, great Team Spirit 510 & 384, Congrats to all the award winners!


By the way, where is team 384 based?


Great match from Team 612 (Chantilly Academy--Northern Virginia), Wish we could join you all in nationals =)