Ventura County Recap
As we’ve returned back to the Netherlands and are slowly getting back into our old rhythm, it’s good to take a look back at last week to see what hurdles we’ve overcome, what’s changed and our perspective on the Ventura County Regional.
Back to Back!
I’m excited to announce that last week, we won the Ventura County Regional! That means, for the first time in Team Rembrandts history, we won two regionals in a single season. Big thanks to our alliance partners 4414 HighTide, 4276 Surf City Vikings and 3863 Pantherbotics!
Alongside the regional win, I’m proud to say we’ve also won our second Excellence in Engineering Award!
Improvements
Upon reflection on week 1, every department had things they wanted to improve for week 2. This list does not contain every single improvement, but is does highlight the most important ones.
Motor Upgrades
We finally received the NEO Vortex motors and SPARK Flex controllers the day before we left after having been stuck at the Dutch customs for 4 weeks. It was too risky to add them before Hueneme, but we were confident enough to add them for week 2.
We changed the most important motors in the Shamper – the top and bottom rollers – to Vortexes to make use of their superior speed and torque as opposed to regular NEOs, as well as saving us some much needed battery power.
We noticed some firmware related issues in the Flex controllers, mostly regarding settings that seemed to reset. For now, we circumvented this by setting the inversion multiple times, and offloading the velocity conversion factor to the RIO instead.
To mount the new motors and controllers, Fabworks generously manufactured two aluminum plates for us so that we can upgrade our robot, even though we’re on the other side of the world.
Judging and Impact
We were very excited with our Excellence in Engineering Award, but we felt that there were other facets of the team that deserved some highlighting as well. Therefore we changed the way we presenting these important aspects of the team.
The same attention was given to our Impact presentation. While the core info remained the same, some parts were restructured based on the feedback from week 1 to make everything more coherent.
Swerve Protection Brackets
We used to have 3D printed brackets between the MAXSwerve modules to prevent excess dust from entering. However, these proved quite brittle when under hard defense. When they eventually ran out, we decided to upgrade to polycarb brackets instead. These ran the whole weekend without breaking.
A Big Thank You
Competing at the other side of the world brings a lot of challenges. Most of the things we’ve achieved in the last two weeks wouldn’t have been possible without local support.
Therefore we would like to extend massive thanks to 4201 The Vitruvian Bots for storing our pit in between the 2023 and 2024 season.
Also, without the hospitality of 4414 HighTide we would have never been able to compete at the level we did. We were guests at their shop during the day for both weeks allowing us to re-assemble and test our robot including some driver practice. Their on-the-spot Fabworks service allowed us to do the Vortex upgrade on the Shamper which was crucial for our week 2 performance.
Working closely together throughout the weeks was a cool and interesting learning experience for our team. Huge shoutout to them and keep up building awesome robots to inspire the FRC community!
Next Steps - The Future of this Build Thread
As we have a few weeks left until we leave for Champs, there are a couple of things that we still want to change, add and fine-tune. Therefore, we are shaping up for
Build Season 2.0 And we are taking you along for the ride! As we resume our normal schedule, you can expect update posts about all topics multiple times a week and we are happy to answer all of your questions!
There are a few more things we want to cover about our Regionals trip, including strategic observations. But I think these would better fit in a separate post.
We are absolutely loving all the feedback we’ve gotten up until now and we hope we can continue the trend for a few more weeks. 
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