WPI Regional

[DominickC]

Hello from Team 23!

Congrats to all the teams, especially the winning alliance. It was a long weekend with a steep learning curve. We met some awesome people with
stellar bots, had our ups and of course, our downs.

Well, our first horror story...
Immediately upon arrival to WPI from the hotel on Thursday, I found the coding laptop I had used just hours before to be dead. True and dead. Thanks to the help of Greg McKaskle (NI Rep) and Alex (Mentor for team 190), and a saved version of our code, we were able to compete, and compete well!

We were shooting accurate during all of practice and most of Friday's qualifications, but we noticed that some balls were doing little more than flopping out of the cannon. We thought it was anything and everything from battery voltage to joysticks...It ended up being wear and tear on some balls. In the Suffield Shakedown, balls were replaced at the first sign of wear. At WPI, the same balls were reused over and over again.
As the balls wore, the seal they created was weaker and weaker, reducing our working output volume of air greatly. This led us to change our strategy from shooting to balancing.

It was a long and hard weekend. Now I'm going to bed, but I want to hear about your experience at WPI!