Milwaukee was awesome, and I know the Midwest will be too. We actually had a decent bot by the time we got to the regional, and with how we did in Milwaukee, I can’t wait to find out how we’ll stand up to the heavy hitters like 111 and the beast. Best of luck to everyone going.
I saw you guys(1732) at Milwaukee and you guys did very well in finals. I was rooting for your alliance and the number five alliance because they had rockford robotics who we are sorta mentoring. I was glad to see you guys do well this year. See ya in a couple of days!
Hey Lav! Is 107 bringing any Vex robots? I’ll have at least one of mine there. It’s pretty pimped out. Nearly a scale model of our 07 bot. Definitely looking forward to a sweet game of Twister on Thursday or Friday night. Not sure when it is. I can’t wait to see what 107 brings in their arsenal also. A 107 ramp bot sounds like a perfect compliment to our bot.
Good luck to all the teams coming to Chicago. God, I’m so excited!
me, val, and roxanna are gunna be there cheering on wildstang 
on saturday!
-Courty-
Is it just me, or are all the drivers getting just a bit more vicious with each match?
Thursday was absolutely ridiculous. One team in particular (who I’m not going to name) smashed us into the rack and managed to break our PVC arm. They didn’t break the glued parts, they actually snapped the PVC. In addition, they had a fairly thin chassis with no bumpers, so they somehow climbed up on our bumpers and broke off our radio, which was mounted vertically right above and slightly inward from the bumper. Needless to say, we spent plenty of time fixing after that.
There were also several other teams that were pretty rough.
During the qualification rounds, I thought the viciousness decreased by quite a bit, but the elimination rounds got pretty nasty. The judges didn’t seem to be watching out for this sort of thing too carefully either. I only remember one 10pt penalty for breaking the bumper zone, and that was when a team got their arm stuck inside Wildstang.
Ouch, tell me about it. Sometimes it just got downright brutal. Did you see what happened to the Beast? Yikes.
Our arm/gripper took quite a beating through all the matches, but luckily nothing that wasn’t fixable. Although it did get scary during the match.
Yeah, Spencer from 1982 told me that they had to replace their claw TWICE.
I was crying for 447, and I was in tears for 1710! Our alliance partner in the semifinals, 1706, had their track knocked off their claw system. Then 2112 got stuck on our Lexan panels after pinning us in the corner, which made everyone in our side fall out of their chairs.
One of the volunteers suggested to our drivers to act more aggressively, and I raised an eyebrow to that.
No one was that aggressive at Milwaukee!
But WOW. That was the craziest final I’ve seen ANYWHERE in the sports world. Grats to everyone! Especially 648 for that awesome display of autonomous sock rocking.
2047 will see everyone in Atlanta. But… the thing is…
I kind of promised the girls on the team that I’d wear a dress at the Championship if we went D:
Oh, out of curiosity… did anyone notice the ‘FIRST Cadenza’ poster I put up in our pit? 
GREAT JOB EVERYONE! The judges and FIRST staffers won’t forget the 2007 Midwest Regional anytime soon!
The Midwest Regional is always one of the more hotly contested regionals and there is always a display of pure performance in the elimination rounds. I’m just glad 648 made it out with only having a chain jump off of a sprocket. We had at least one robot on us at all time, most of the time two. They were battering us from all sides. Multiple times did our arm get stuck inside the rack. We were penalized for having our arm inside of Wildstang, but it most certainly wasn’t intentional. When we released the tube the arm went right down into their robot.
I was terribly sad to have to face our good friends, 107, in the quarterfinals. That was one tough round. Then again, all of the first seeded alliance’s rounds were sent to overtime.
Congrats to 71 for winning Chairman’s at MWR.
That was easily the most stressful and the most intense 20 minutes of my life.
648 et al: You play hard. You earned our spot as much as we did.
Wildstang et al: Many thanks. Couldn’t have done it without you.
(If you look in the webcast, I’m the skinny white kid in the blue labcoat in 904’s station.)
EDIT:
And thank you to a very important team: 71 for lending us a battery at the end.
FRC 648 was awesome in autonomous mode! Well done!
The only robot I saw score in autonomous mode during 2 regionals.
This happened during the opening autonomous mode in the 3rd Match of a marathon, 5 match Midwest Regional Final.
Team Roboto 447 would like to thank 1000 and 648 for an awesome runner-up alliance.
Congrats to 111 and the remainder of the Winning Midwest Alliance.
Congrats to 71 on your Chairmans award.
Does anyone have video of the rest of the finals from the Mid-West regional? Particularity looking for the semi-final matches with 501 and 71.
Thanks,
Justin
It’s coming. It takes a decent amount of work to parse up the video of the matches and recompress them for download, though. I would have liked to get it all done yesterday but I had to spend most of the day catching up on all the other stuff that I’ve been ignoring to do FIRST 
I’m hoping that by the end of the week I’ll have all of my video footage downloaded to my computer and then I can upload anything that pertains to 71 or 501 to the internet somewhere. I don’t have much, though, only the semifinals.
we were getting pushed around so much that we need to make johnny pull some starcraft awsomeness on teh feild. but congrats to everyone and thank you for everything! i had a blast at midwest and ya’ll are craaaazy when it copmes to cheering!
and adrian, if i make teh dress your wearing it to natin… i mean championships!
and wowza :ahh: will we need to do repairs on Lola come atlanta… some teams were vicious. … yep there be my 2 cents
now off to fundraise like crazy
Hope to see ya down there in Atlanta. (Maybe our pits will be next to eachother again!) Weren’t you guys like in at least 4 of our matches, either with or against us, in addition to the ones up at the Wisconsin Regional? You guys had a solid machine, no doubt about it, especially that holonomic drive. It was a pleasure playing with y’all through all those matches.
MWR was a ton of fun. 1243 and 1781 were great partners, although we lost in the semifinals. If only 1243’s arm didn’t break in the 2nd semi final match, because we had a great plan to beat Wildstang. Anyway, next stop is Atlanta!
Yeah, sorry about the failure. What happened was that the master link came out of the 1st reduction drive chain for the arm. It was fine all through GLR and MWR up to that point! It did allow us to play some pretty effective D against Wildstang at the rack which we were happy with, but they had one more option up their sleeve than we did with their dual ramp. Guess it just wasn’t our time. The elims were still a ton of fun and we thank you guys for picking us!
If it wasn’t for your scoring and lifting abilities, we wouldn’t have made it past the first round, so don’t feel bad about it. We had a good run. It also reminded us of the Wisconsin Regional where 1816’s transmission broke in the semi-finals. If I was another team, I wouldn’t want to be our alliance partner becauase it seems that we are bad luck…