QUESTION OF THE WEEK!!!

[archiver]

Posted by ChrisH at 04/10/2001 3:08 PM EST


Engineer on team #330, Beach 'Bots, from Hope Chapel Academy and NASA JPL, J & F Machine, Raytheon, et al.


In Reply to: QUESTION OF THE WEEK!!!
Posted by Andy Grady on 04/09/2001 3:48 PM EST:



I can think of two:

We had one match where everything went wrong. We were supposed to balance the goals and while the near goal was being filled a small ball got loose and lodged under the bridge. We had kept a limbo bot (sorry I don't recall the number) on the near side to deal with this potential problem and reset the bridge. For some reason, they were unable to do either.

So we dropped our ball handling "tusks" and swept out the ball, something we'd never tried before. Then we reset the bridge, something we had done, but last time we did it we broke the machine in the process. Sweeping operation successful we now charge over the bridge and get the other goal while the limbobot gets hung up on the 4x4.

We successfully grab the goal and get up close to the center of the bridge. We balance, we think, but just before we hit the button the bridge starts to sag. A quick over correction sends the bridge back the other way. Before we can recover the clock runs out. All that trouble because of one silly small ball.

But our guys hung in there and kept playing and working for that multiplier, it would have been easy to quit early. I was proud of them.

The other was when team 660 King-Drew won the Rookie All-Star award. I knew who it was when they mentioned the wide range of support including from a certain source. They were one of the teams we mentored. It was almost as good as getting it ourselves, but then we haven't been rookies for a long time.

Chris Husmann, PE
Team 330 the Beach'Bots