A salute to simplicity

[CircularLogic]

As we all know, the autonomous modes this year were extremely important to a team's success. Some teams had amazing and complex autonomous modes where all they would do is set up their bot and their camera would do all the work for them to put in 10 balls. We were all amazed by their technical skills.

But I would like to especially recognize the teams that did nothing more than initialize autonomous and have their drive trains go forward. With that little bit of code, a good eye, great scouting ( a scout on my team watched another team refine their autonomous mode for two hours at a competion just to get an accurate report), and a little bit of intuition, teams were able to make that little bit of code go a real long way.

Setting up for a match was like a game of chess. You knew your piece's abilities, you knew theirs. It was a game to guess what they were going to do.

For me, nothing felt better than watching the powerhouse's 10 balls fly off into nowhere or hit my robot because of a well placed straightline auto mode.

So a salute to simplicity is in order.

Anyone have any stories of an awesome play, a great calculation, or a stroke of luck in your favor.


Here's one from me.

It was the our match of the saturday at SBPLI. My team (1546) was nervous considering we were facing an alliance with both 353 and 329. With the ramp capabilities of 353 and the dumping of 329, it looked like a sure loss. We needed every point possible to win. 353 had just developed a new autonomous to put them in prime position for going up the ramp in the first driver controlled period. We decided that it was more important to stop them from getting an easy ramp then to stop a possible 10 point dump by 329. So we line up our robot to go to the exact spot where 353 would go and set auto to a slow moving straight line. We end up contacting 353 while they were still moving, causing them to turn a little, causing them to hit 329 who was attempting a cross field auto dump. All 10 of 329's balls just hit the side wall and bounced around the sides. We won autonomous and a last second alliance ramp at the end of the match afforded us a narrow victory over these powerhouses.


P.S. I sincerely apologize to any teams that feel we hit them a little hard in auto. It was not our intention to harm, but we needed that speed to be effective.