2006 Pittsburgh Regional

[StephLee]

I have to say, Pittsburgh was the most up-and-down thrill ride my team has ever been on.

Our robot, thankfully, didn't have major mechanical problems the entire weekend. A loose drive chain and a slightly bent frame after a fall was the worst we had to deal with on that end. However, our autonomous mode that worked so amazingly well at home didn't like the lighting at Pitt, and the camera wouldn't lock on properly. We discovered a bad lense in our camera on Thursday, and then a bad switch in the replacement we recieved; mix-and-matching the parts along with an hour or so spent playing with the focus and a few other things had it working better. We eventually developed a solid camera-controlled autonomous mode, thanks to persistence by our programmers.

As far as matches went, we came out 7 and 5, seeded in 5th. The second-ranked team, 393, picked us during the alliance selections, and BOY did our alliance in general have some cruddy luck during the elimination rounds. The quarter finals went smoothly, that's true; after that, though, we fought for everything we got. 393 had some problems with their drive train, unfortunately, but they just kept plugging away at it, trying to keep their bot moving. I was amazed at how they kept at it time after time, because something went wrong basically every match. 1370, our other partner, had a few more minor problems as well, and they worked hard to keep their robot running as well. During the semi-finals, we won a match then lost a match, then thought we'd lost but tied (the scoring system went a bit nutty). I'm never going to forget the feeling of thinking the competition was over for us, then finding out we were still in it; it was the most amazing feeling. Our whole alliance was yelling and high-fiving, it was incredible. The next match, an opponent ran into the alliance wall in front of us during autonomous pretty hard. Our control panel flipped off and landed upside down, snapping our joystick beyond repair. While the robot was doing donuts on the field, we were yelling to the refs that our joystick had broken; they stopped the match, and we got a replacement from our pit. We had to calibrate the joystick, and then played our last semi final match. We won by three points; it was an amazing match.