What's going on in DA CUTTT? aka: UTC Regional update thread.

[whakojacko]

o yes.... sacramento....heheh we only got in 1 practice round, a lot of teams had similar "fun". We had to replace the old 6v fps with new 12 ones which meant takeing apart our spool mechanism and (with we needed the new gearbox as well) and re-wiring. Not many teams (well except maybe 330, kudos to them) were got to 3 or 4 of their partice matches

[Stephen.Yanczura]

Jaine:

If I remember correctly you guys are using six wheel drive? Maybe try letting some pressure out of the tires with the majority of the weight over them? Start with just one end (front or back) and then maybe let it out of the middle also. If you only have four wheel drive, try just one end of the bot. Play around with different tire pressures all around, kind of like ghetto suspension tuning .

Cya in the pits....
....look for the blue spikes!

[Jaine Perotti]

Originally Posted by snipr22

Jaine:

If I remember correctly you guys are using six wheel drive? Maybe try letting some pressure out of the tires with the majority of the weight over them? Start with just one end (front or back) and then maybe let it out of the middle also. If you only have four wheel drive, try just one end of the bot. Play around with different tire pressures all around, kind of like ghetto suspension tuning .

Cya in the pits....
....look for the blue spikes!

We are in fact using a 4 wheel drive system.
The problem with letting air out of the tires is that the tires get pinched by the rim when we turn. This will lead to flat tires, and maybe even the mysterious phenomenon of the inner tube coming out completely and becoming entangled with the chain and sprocket, which happened today. So right now our only choice is to increase the psi... and bounce ALOT. So if there is any other way to fix this problem without letting air out of the tires, it would be ideal. If not, I guess... oh well.

But thank you for your advice anyways... it is much appreciated.

-- Jaine

[Jeff Rodriguez]

Janie, have you thought about using the hard inserts in the tires? That way you won't have to worry about them going flat or anything.
We use them and it works great.

[Rob]

Originally Posted by BurningQuestion

We are in fact using a 4 wheel drive system.
The problem with letting air out of the tires is that the tires get pinched by the rim when we turn. This will lead to flat tires, and maybe even the mysterious phenomenon of the inner tube coming out completely and becoming entangled with the chain and sprocket, which happened today. So right now our only choice is to increase the psi... and bounce ALOT. So if there is any other way to fix this problem without letting air out of the tires, it would be ideal. If not, I guess... oh well.

But thank you for your advice anyways... it is much appreciated.

-- Jaine

We had this same problem last year, with our tire pinching when we turned and the rim actually popping it. The solution for us was to cover one set of tires in the 2" pool hose from home depot. We called this "poor mans omni wheels" It grips fairly well forward and reverse, but can glide sideways. We also tried filling the tires with expanding foam (also from home depot) to deaden the bounciness a bit but this added alot of weight.

The easiest solution is to put zip ties around the wheels. Ugly, but it has a simmilar effect as the pool hose.

I will be at UTC tomorrow, and I hope to see all of the great machines in action!
Best of luck!

Rob

[dshidler]

Well here i am sitting in the stands during lunch (Thank you NETPLEX :-)). Anyways, a lot of people are saying that it is hard to figure out the penalties and points from the stands. Also, the highest score i saw here today was 80 w/ a 10 point penalty during match #11. Alot of teams are being really defensive against the good teams making it extremely hard for them to score. I'll update some more as the day progresses. Be sure to check out the webcast too!

999 out.

[rocknthehawk]

Jaine,
I know it doesn't help a whole lot, but it is possible you are letting too much air out of the tires and it is causing the beads to unseat. Basically the only solution that doesn't require anything over or on the tire would be to just mess around with the air pressure until you can find one that works.

[Jaine Perotti]

Well, I must say that today was WORLDS better than yesterday for team 716.

We finally got our hook to work... and it works well now. We moved up from being the 23rd seed at the beginning of today to being the 4th seed by the time todays rounds were over. We also experienced great success with our autonomous modes... we consistently capped the center home goal with the tetra that we were allowed to start with. So kudos to team 716's lone rookie programmer this year...Dillon (CmptrGk), for getting this to work!

As for our wheel problem, we didn't get that resolved. I am not sure if we are going to do anything about it at this point, because we really don't have any materials to work with to make the wheels slide easier. For example, I love the pool hose idea, but we don't have any. And as for the tire inserts, I don't really know what they are...so I don't think we have any. As for zip ties, I was told by Andy Brockway, our engineer, that they wouldn't have enough surface area to make much of a difference.

Jaine,
I know it doesn't help a whole lot, but it is possible you are letting too much air out of the tires and it is causing the beads to unseat. Basically the only solution that doesn't require anything over or on the tire would be to just mess around with the air pressure until you can find one that works.

This WAS our problem, as I said earlier. Our tire pressure was too low, but when we made it higher, our wheels bounced very badly. So I guess we are stuck with the bounciness, unless we can come up with something else. Thanks to everyone here for giving us suggestions as to how to fix this problem though!

Good luck to everyone tomorrow..this has been a wonderful and exciting event.

-- Jaine

[MisterX]

What did everybody think of the UTC Team Social today? I think the food line was better run having four lines and needing to go straight through versus the two and truning around last year. However, I liked the comedian and magician much better then the magician this year. I would have to agree with here on one thing the best trick was our clapping cause that was just a mystery that it happened some of the times.

[artdutra04]

Hello again

As the Friday matches of the UTC regional came to a close, wow were there surprises, and then again there was the usual. Here's the rundown of what happened today:
- 230. For anyone who watched the UTC Scrimmage or the practice rounds yesterday, 230 seemed like they would dominate the field with their 3-tetra-at-once loading mechanism. But somehow, as the results below show, 230 ended up with surprisingly near the bottom of the list.
- 228. Before today, no one expected us to be a awesome robot. But as the results show, we stayed in the top 5 for the entire day, with Gus being the number 1 seed for most of the morning. We were also in the highest scoring match of the day (as far as I know) along with teams 178 and 271, for a score of 87 points. (That was an exciting match, as I was the arm driver )
- 173. As usual, RAGE has once again proven themselves a powerhouse team.
- 178. A good, solid robot, especially since it can hold upwards of 5 tetras on it.
- 20. The only team to go undefeated today.

There were several high scores today. RAGE's alliance had 75 points in one match and 1071/271/? had 80 points in another (90 before the penalty). And here's the ranking (as of 6 PM Friday):

Ranking/Team #
1. 20
2. 178
3. 69
4. 716
5. 228
6. 173
7. 558
8. 1124
9. 126
10. 177
11. 195
12. 546
13. 236
14. 271
15. 1665
16. 1373
17. 1071
18. 1524
19. 157
20. 521
21. 1685
22. 809
23. 181
24. 19
25. 1568
26. 905
27. 999
28. 296
29. 571
30. 839
31. 230
32. 1099
33. 1100
34. 1493

Good luck to all teams for their Saturday matches!

[nobrakes8]

Lots of good teams with 3-4 losses as well this year, just seems like a lot of very good teams aren't getting good breaks. It's going to be an interesting day tomorrow, I think teams ranked 9-15 all have a major impact this year. Team 126, 271, 1071, 546 and I bet 230 will all be in that 9-15 area tomorrow around selection time, all those teams are solid. 126, 1071, 230 could all make serious runs if they're put with the right partners.

The way UTC is going, I think we have a lot of parity, I think about 10-11 teams really stand out, even though some aren't ranked as high as they should be, but lots of penalties and not much help from alliances are killing some very good teams. I bet the way it's all setting up, any of the top 5 seeds can really say they have an awsome shot at winning. Something I noticed since I've been in first is usually the top 2 or 3 seeds usually win, but UTC is really shapeing up to have some very strong 4-5 seeds and even the 6-7-8 seeds are going to be tougher than in previous years.

Team 20 really isn't getting the credit for being 8-0-0 (or 9-0-0)... Lots of people are looking at 69 and 126 as being the teams to beat, but team 20 is really getting the job done.

[Ted Boucher]

Well today was a great improvement over Thursdays practice match game play. I have been doing field reset for the past 2 days and will be doing it Saturday. Field reset gives you the opportunity to see every single round played and to watch the game play progress and become more complex as the competition goes on. I would really like to see the robots using the CMU camera vision system to get on the field and stack a vision tetra in autonomous. I want my team to be able to do it first in a official match, but I would really like to see it happen regardless of the team that completes it. Everyone, please be careful when you are picking up a tetra from the autoloader or you are close to a robot preforming this task. The penalties that you can receive here are match altering and are hard to recover from.


Jaine,
Most of the suggestions that have been made are pretty good and here is mine. Team 237 has used a drop down system in 2003 and 2004 to eliminate the robot from jumping all over the field and not turning easily. (1st 2004 pic and 2nd 2004 pic) This got us on 2 drive wheels and gave us a smooth, easy turning robot. This is a option that could be implemented on your robot somehow, but I am not sure about the amount of weight you have to spare and the time you have available to make it in. Your drivers were doing well with the problem and as long as they keep with it, you should be fine.

Saturday should be great, good luck to all and see you on the field!!!!

[kulisb]

Well, it doesn't look as though anyone has posted on the UTC winners yet......here goes!

The winning alliance....

69 HYPER
126 GaelForce
1071 Max

Finalists.....

20
173 Rage
230 Gael Hawks

The competition was great and exciting as always. The finals couldn't have been any more close or competitive! Congrats to all teams!

[peaseonearth]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

t.
Ranking/Team #
1. 20
2. 178
3. 69
4. 716
5. 228
6. 173
7. 558
8. 1124
9. 126
10. 177
11. 195
12. 546
13. 236
14. 271
15. 1665
16. 1373
17. 1071
18. 1524
19. 157
20. 521
21. 1685
22. 809
23. 181
24. 19
25. 1568
26. 905
27. 999
28. 296
29. 571
30. 839
31. 230
32. 1099
33. 1100
34. 1493

Good luck to all teams for their Saturday matches!

You forgot the 35 ranked team!
176 Aces High
Yeah well everyone has a bad day.

[CmptrGk]

we had some slight issues during finals. we have our autonomous switches plugged into the OI. with our interesting way of folding up the control box there was stress on the solder point, so we lost the ground on all of the switches for autonomous. gah, so at that point it reverted to another autonomous which went forward and turned towards the autoload station. well, since we were attempting to cap during autonomous we were facing towards the center goal near the driver station. then it turned and smashed into our alliance partners. then trying to move around the caping part of autonomous i opened the wrong version of the project file. then we lost to blue, not sure what the score was. but it was fun though.

on another note, with our capping autonomous, we managed to be able to get a triple play during autonomous once. has this happened anywhere else so far? we also managed to cap the center goal near the driver station about 8 times during autonomous. but in the end it was a good day. I'm happy with how we did, and also the autonomous modes(I'm a rookie programmer).

dillon