Kevin, the robot looks great. I like how the gripper release does not interfere with the robot backing away from the tube and the natural descent of the elevator mechanism.
We are going to miss not being at North Star this year. Best of luck to you and the rest of the Fighting Calculators.
They better get it up and running smoothly! As a former Fighting Calculator now located across the country they know there will be consequences if they don’t
Fantastic. Our “older” sister school (1730) will be playing with you guys this year, and we are hoping to watch and cheer for them from afar.
After watching them (and losing to them) in person at the GKC regional I think they’ve built their most competative robot yet. :yikes: They are one of the premiere robotics teams in the KC area, and their technical prowess and community outreach efforts inspire us to aim higher.
Congrats to the winners 3278, 2177, 2549. Congrats to team 1730 on the Chairman’s Award and being Finalists. The other finalists 2512 and 2225 also deserve congratulations for giving us some very exciting final matches. Finally congrats to EI winners 1764 and Rookie All Star winners 3750.
I will be joining 2175 at the Championship and hope to see you all there!
Who watched the last 2 games? It seems to be a general consensus that the refs missed several should-be red cards on the blue alliance and that the wrong team was given the win. There was also a dispute about a mini bot that hit the pole so hard that it didn’t register. I’m looking for some opinions.
Bringing this topic up under a new account without a team number, may not be the best of ideas…
That being said, from the webcast it looked like a blue alliance robot was touching the one tower while another blue robot pushed a tube into 1730 who was attempting to deploy their minibot. Of course, the webcast was not at the correct angle to determine if contact was actually made with the tower and robot. I assume the refs, who had the correct viewing angles, made the right calls.
I was present at the event and saw all three matches. I have this to say:
As we all know, the decision of the refs are final. Still, the behavior exhibited by the losing alliance, while understandable, was unprofessional and not in the spirit of First. After seeing the pointless arguing that occurred, I don’t disagree with the ref’s decision to stand firm with his decision.
With the #1 seed having 2 of its 3 teams pre-qualified for nationals, I feel a majority would be content with the results of the regional. (7 robots go to nationals rather than 5) In fact, I think this regional highlighted a fatal flaw in the tournament system that limits the number of opportunities for teams to experience nationals.
I don’t know why the red cards were assessed, and I don’t know the specific rules on the situation in match #2. So I would like to know if anybody could clarify. That said, I feel the blue alliance did win match #3 fairly, so without a match #4, the red alliance cannot claim a stolen victory.
I’m a vikings fan. Anyone who saw the NFC championship game can agree arguing the penalties doesn’t solve anything…
Hey great job everyone who went to North Star. I’m the driver from team 3042, we are the team that had the wings that fold down for defense. On behaff of my team I can say we all had a blast after our technical difficulties were worked out. A special thanks to the Robettes(2177) and Charger robotics (537) if they read this, without the students from your teams that helped us with our electronics issues, we would have probably missed more than one match throughout the weekend. And also a thanks to The Kuh-nig-its (1939) for helping us through the course of the weekend to get a working minibot up the pole, sorry that we were unable to make it up the pole for points (we did get it up once but only after we went a second early).
What is everyone’s opinion on defense this weekend? I feel that defensive teams are underestimated every year so we tried to fill that niche this year.
Hi All,
OK I’ll give this a second try. I had a nice long response written and then it didn’t submit properly and I lost all I typed. I’ll try to keep this one brief.
I am the lead mentor for team 2225. We are very grateful to team 2512 selecting us for their alliance. As was shown in the championship rounds 2 bots on offense with 1 on defense is a winning combination.
We have a very small team and have been beaten often and by the best in FRC regionals over the past 5 years. Don’t mistake anything we say or do for being sore losers. Being beaten by a better team is easier to accept than being beaten due to human opinion or technical difficulty of the field. We’ve always licked our wounds and came back. Next year we will come back stronger, it’s just these wounds are a little bit saltier than any we’ve had before.
We know the rules and abide by the judges decisions. I only ask that those of you on this forum but your self in the red alliances shoes and having won the second final match and getting excited about going to St. Louis, have that taken away.
Penalties and judges opinions are Human error and Human success. The averages never seem to work out for everyone but what can we do. Professional sports administers penalties and fouls the same way and we all hate it but we end up having to live with it. Technical accuracy in scoring is, on the other hand, something we can address. I don’t foresee the results changing and am not asking that they do. I only ask that we as a FIRST community look at this and see if all of our expertise (there’s a lot of engineers and scientists in this thing) can find a way to handle discrepancies (like team 2512 minibot hitting the scoring disc and not registering) with the technology at hand. We all know technology can fail or hiccup. These are easy things to administer. Especially when so much is on the line.
One last request I have for us all is to focus on making FIRST better rather than fight over who is right about the way today went. Lets effect change so that we won’t be back here in 12 months talking about the same thing.
