Hueneme Port Recap
Thank you all so much for the nice messages we received here, as well as in real life last week. It’s amazing to hear that we can make an impact on so many teams 
.
As our week 2 event approaches, I quickly want to take a look back at week 1. This post will include the hurdles we had to overcome, as well as some strategical insights we learned last week.
Regional Winners!
Last week, we won the Hueneme Port regional together with our alliance partners 3647 Millenium Falcons and 9452 LHS Steel Stingers! We could not have done this without them. 3647 delivered much needed offensive power and 9452 played incredible defense, which allowed us to outscore the other alliances that were playing triple offense.
Alongside that, we were awarded with the Excellence in Engineering award!
Hurdles
Going back to earlier in the week, we encountered some unexpected things that were different compared to home. We were able to work around most of these issues, however, I would like to highlight them here.
Different Carpet
One of the first hurdles we had to overcome was a big difference in the type of carpet our field at home uses compared to the official carpet (which is not available in the Netherlands). The stuff we have at home has way more grip, meaning we would never see any notes sliding across the floor.
Lucklily the effectiveness of our intake itself didn’t really pose a problem. However, alignment to notes needed to be way more precise than originally envisioned. This meant we had to adjust all our auto paths on the Thursday before the event.
Field Tape
We had some issues with field tape coming loose and getting stuck in one of our swerve modules. This caused the wheel to stop spinning and it developed a major flat spot, not only ruining our speed for that match, but also requiring us to change the wheel out for a new one.
Lighting
With the introduction of AprilTags last year, the need to constantly retune your vision setup has significantly reduced. However, when the light color and intensity shift drastically troughout the day, this doesn’t really add up.
For context, the Hueneme Port and Ventura County regionals are held in a hangar. During the day, enough daylight enters the field through the huge doors, but when the sun sets, the field is illuminated by yellow/orange lights, with big shadows being cast over the AprilTags by the speakers.
This resulted in us having to tune the setup multiple times between matches. To the point where even with a very high exposure – meaning a lot of motion blur and thus worse readings – the tags still weren’t able to be read consistently.
During the finals, almost all our speaker shots were done using presets, while during the day, almost all our shots could be done by auto aiming.
Battery Temperature
The most unexpected hurdle of all: cold batteries. In our workshop (and at worlds), our batteries are kept way warmer than they could be at Hueneme. This results in a significantly shorter battery life during matches.
We solved this issue in a rather beun janky way by charging the batteries inside our team member’s hoodies. It is hard to measure the actual impact of this, but empirically, it feels like it worked.
The Importance of Defense
Before the event started, we were thinking about the application of defense during this year’s game. After a few quick calculations, it turned out that almost all shots in the speaker can be blocked by a well placed net. This works especially well when the robot you are defending against has to touch the subwoofer, as you don’t even need a net in that case.
“Smiley Face of Doom”
Cue our solution: a garden fence construction, although it quickly became known by the community as the “Smiley Face of Doom”. Right after alliance selection, we went to 9452 with the haul from Home Depot and together we quickly started to construct a PVC skeleton to max height.
As you might have seen, tarp didn’t cover the entire structure. This was an important strategic and moral decision as we didn’t want to push 9452 to take away any working features. Because during quals, they were actually quite a good offensive robot.
Initially, we wanted to fill the structure with orange construction fencing, but we quickly figured that while it would block notes, it might not block something more valuable: vision readings. Blocking vision readings can be extra beneficial, as it would completely shut down auto aiming robots.
Therefore we ultimately decided to fill up the frame with construction tarp instead, and top it off with an orange smiley.
Scoring Opportunities
While the construction of the frame was beneficial, we really shouldn’t underestimate the absolute skill displayed by 9452s driveteam. At multiple points, they were blocking 2 or even 3 robots from scoring at the same time. During our second finals match, they even blocked all speaker attemps while it was amplified.
Most teams had quite a good speaker setup, but a lot of them didn’t really focus on the amp. Meaning only a single scoring spot needed to be defended. If a defence bot can stay in place while the other robots have to do full court cycles, two offensive robots not under defense can outscore the three opposing robots.
As 9452 still had a fully working intake and shooter, they were able to collect the missed notes and shoot them to our side of the field to also play a good supportive role as feeder as well.
