Some Notes from KSC

[Jason Rudolph]

Well, it was quite an exciting weekend at KSC, and I have a few observations/notes I would like to share with the rest of you.

First of all, the balls. I was quite surprised to see so few ball collecting robots at KSC. I was even more surprised when I found out that many of them couldn't really collect balls, including us. We picked up 20 balls easily when we would practice at home, but couldn't pick up more than 5 at KSC. I talked to many other teams, and they were having similar problems. Many teams thought the balls were over-inflated. I know that FIRST inflated them to pressure, however..... When we inflated our balls to pressure at home, they were approx 8 inches in diameter. We went to the field and measured one ball off the field, and it's diameter was 9 inches. Could be a reason for the failures. I don't know if this was the same at VCU.

Secondly, this game was extremely odd in the sense that really none of the best robots that were at KSC were in the original top 8 at KSC. In fact, there were three robots there that didn't even work that were in the 30's out of 47. I can't tell you how many times I saw an alliance go out there and dominate, and end up with 0 qp's. Occasionally I saw a team who was losing run out of their home EZ at the last second to give the winning alliance less qp's. Strategies really began to change on saturday morning, and the scores got better. Scouting is definitely important.

Entanglement, I only know of a few devices that were dis-allowed, and this was done on the practice day. Most devices were ok. We were allowed to use the old battery chargers, and as far as the batteries go, I never saw one dis-allowed.

One more thing. In quite a few matches where teams got into shoving matches, I saw robots go dead. This was usually because a robot with some sort of protrusion had turned off the other robot's main breaker (accidentally of course). I even saw one match where an alliance was completely dominating the field, then one got pushed into the other, one tripped their breaker cause they were drawing too much current, and when the other robot tried to push their partner back to their home ez, their partner's arm switched off thier breaker. End result, two dead robots in the middle of the field.

Well, that's all, good luck to everyone in the upcoming regionals.

Jason