Sorry for the late upload guys, it’s been pretty hectic around here as we prep for Mecklenburg States (oops).
Looking back on my last post, the picture of our robot looking majestic, I realize just how long a road these last few weeks have been. Firstly, Pembroke.
Loading into Pembroke we felt pretty good. We quickly had some hiccups, including a rio that refused to flash (resisted three highlighters and our lead programmer for a couple hours), bumpers in not the best condition, and a very long inspection queue ready for us when we fixed those issues. However, we were still excited for the day to come, and had a long night in the hotel strategizing and coding autos (sadly the autos being done this late would be a sign of things to comei.)
We went into Saturday, and started to play our quals matches. We quickly noticed that our handoff mechanism had stopped working in our first match, reducing us to amp only. We lost that match, 35-7. Back in the pit, we realized that the one of two polycord belts running the bottom roller of our handoff had broken in half. A significant part of the rest of the day would be spent janking some fix together that would break as soon as we ran it. Eventually we settled on putting the remaining polycord back on, (we had taken it off because we thought it would break too if the handoff was only running on one of them), and a lot of rubber bands on the other side.
The rest of Saturday (and the majority of Sunday) looked a lot like this. Something would break, we would spend three hours fixing it, and then it would work. We went through this process with Swerve (a module had fallen apart, causing us to miss a qual to fix it), elevator, autos, a lot of things were breaking. However, a huge upside of the design of our bot is its versatility. If elevator broke, we could still intake and shoot into speaker. If shooter broke, we could score in amp. Climb stayed working the whole event (other than when it broke for a couple matches), and we could fall back on that to get a couple bonus points at the end of any given match.
This routine of break, repair, and break again was not good for anyone. As the seeded #1 team (per statbotics), we had high hopes for this weekend, and were really excited to show off our bot that we had poured so many long nights into. Consistently breaking meant we were in a bad position ranking wise, but more importantly meant we could not perform how we knew our bot was capable of. However, we had to keep moving forward and fighting match after match.
Before lunch on Sunday, we got picked as the second choice on the eighth alliance. Huge thanks to 9008 for picking us, and for 7443 for being a great partner. As strategy lead, I was super happy with this placement, and knew our alliance was capable of great things. However, the placement was a blow to all of us, as it was significantly lower than we wanted to be that weekend. Staying with the theme of moving on, we sucked it up and got ready to go against alliance #1 in the first match of playoffs.
Yeah that was fun.
Even with our alliance captain having to play defense most of the match (due to issues I’ve forgotten), we still pulled ahead and knocked Alliance one down to the lower bracket. Even if the victory was off of penalties, we went into match seven of the playoffs feeling pretty good. Unfortunately we were much too slow in that match and lost 44-57.
Not much else to say about playoffs. We won one in the lower bracket, but then Alliance one had their revenge, kicking us out of the tournament 60-52. We suffered some mechanical issues in these matches, but overall were much better off that we had been in quals.
Leaving Pembroke, an event we had expected to do very well with, without even an award left us all pretty sad. We went to our homes all knowing we could do better, and determined to push in the next two weeks to make this year amazing.
In general, we were mainly thinking about the reliability of our bot. Unlike last year, when we had to completely rebuild and change our bot between our first event and Mecklenburg, this year we focused on programming time, small mechanical changes, and practice practice practice. None of our issues at Pem were large mechanical ones, but they all neatly fell into one of two categories.
- Mechanical reliability
We broke and broke and broke and broke over the course of this weekend, from handoff to swerve to really any part of the bot you could think of. We marked this down to not having ran our bot against a wall and pushed it to its limits. We never tried to break the bot, and in doing so forgot and ignored one of the most important golden rules (“If you didn’t break it at home, you’ll definitely break it at competition.”)
- Programming issues
On Saturday, we did not have a working auto, so for the most part we just sat there, sometimes scoring our preloaded note. We also had a variety of other issues, from our elevator running at .2x speed accidentally, to driver’s controls not working properly. These had a similar root cause, which was lack of time to test and develop, along with a devastatingly small programming team (consisting of maybe two students and a mentor). This team did not have enough time to test things on the bot, nor enough manpower to make solid code for every part of the bot.
For both of these issues, a significant root cause was lack of time. Due to the fact that we did not have to rebuild our whole bot this year, we decided to devote a lot of our time in the coming two weeks to perfecting and testing every aspect of the bot into the ground. We would run practice matches, spend hours on autos, and just put in a massive amount of effort into making the bot as reliable and sound as possible. We also made some small mechanical changes, such as replacing the polybelt on the handoff with a chain- driven system that would actually never break (although same could not be said about the notes passing through it, oops.)
We went into our week four event feeling better than before, thinking we were reliable and a top contender for the blue banner at Mecklenburg.
To see if this would turn out like we hoped it to, check back soon for my Mecklenburg update!
(Or check blue alliance, if you’re lame.)
Signing off,
Wyatt B
1533 Co- Captain
so we are working pretty hard to make it a good one.
