Congratulations 1114, 217 and 148

[Jim Meyer]

I just wanted to echo the congratulations to 1114, 217 and 148. You guys made a truely epic alliance. It was hard to feel bad about losing to you guys.

For those of you curious about what we were scrambling around working on before the championship match, when we'd gotten tangled up and tipped over in the last match of the semi-finals, our arm feedback potentiometer stopped working. We had a spare installed on the other side of the arm, but we'd never really tested it. Apparently we'd forgotten about the little fact that it rotated in the opposite direction, so the polarity was backwards. By the time we'd gotten this all sorted out, it was time for our first match of the championship. With a broken arm pot this meant we couldn't knock any balls off in hybrid. We were very disappointed as we'd just gotten our 2 ball hybrid working (second ball worked both times we'd tried it).

In that first match we also broke one of the two lexan flex plates that allow our roller to survive impacts. In the mad dash to get the flex plate and our potentiometer fixed in the 5 minutes after the first championship match (never did get either fixed ), we hadn't noticed that our packaging device was broken until we were on our way to the field (it only takes 2 bolts to replace). Thankfully the judges gave us a zip tie to cobble it in place for the last match. I guess our machine was getting even with us, it'd been virtually problem-free all year.

Does anyone happen to know why we don't have any awards planned between those last two matches? Sure would have helped us out. We spent hours waiting around for our matches before that, then those last minutes frantically trying to fix out crippled bot. Our drivers did a fantastic job with a machine that didn't grip balls very well and an arm that had to be positioned manually.

Again, Congratulations to the awesome championship teams. Hope to see you at IRI.