FRC9443 Aluminum Panthers | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[karomata]

FRC9443 Aluminum Panthers from Pentucket Regional Middle High School in Massachusetts is excited to announce our membership in the Open Alliance for the 2024 Crescendo Season!

Our Story

We are a 2024 Rookie FRC team founded by our district’s Assistant Superintendent, who is the parent of a FIRST student and former principal of nearby high school with an FRC program. Understanding the immense value FIRST provides students, our Assistant Superintendent formed our team and brought in myself from Buffalo, NY to lead this team and build out a complete FIRST program at Pentucket Regional School District.

We’re off to a roaring start, with nearly 30 students enrolled, 10 mentors and multiple sponsors. We’ve spent preseason taking on outreach projects, constructing 2 drivebases, and building relationships with our community. We’re excited to be a part of the NE FIRST Community, and will be attending Granite State and North Shore this season.

Links
Instagram | Facebook | GitHub | Website

Why did we join Open Alliance?

As a rookie team with deep existing connections to our FIRST community, we recognize the opportunity to capture the rookie experience through a new lens in partnership with the Open Alliance, and as proud members of the FIRST community, we recognize an obligation to share our story in the hope that it helps others. We hope that our story this season will help inspire others to get involved with FIRST, try new things, and challenge themselves.

Team Structure

We have 4 primary subteams, 2 auxiliary subteams, and a Student Leadership team.

Primary Subteams:

1. Mechanical - responsible for design, fabrication and construction of the robot, with emphasis on simplicity and elegance while maintaining effectiveness.

2. Electrical - responsible for assembling control system infrastructure and creating management systems for electrical components, such as motor controllers, sensors, and control system components.

3. Programming - responsible for development and testing of robot and autonomous code, in addition to peripheral systems such as scouting.

4. Awards - responsible for documentation, data aggregation, and formation of award submissions. This subteam aspires to create competitive award submissions with the goal of earning an Impact Award from the efforts undertaken by our whole team.

Secondary Subteams:

1. Strategy - responsible for deep game analysis, development of game, tournament, and robot design strategy. The goal of this subteam is to guide decision making in season to make us as competitive as possible, both in robot design AND award submissions.

2. Rookie Efforts - responsible for undertaking efforts specific to our rookie season, such as team uniform, branding details, team attributes, and more. This subteam also focuses on identifying causes and efforts that our team is passionate about, which will directly translate into leadership roles that will be translated into new roles on our Student Leadership team next season.

Student Leadership

Our student leaders have applied for their roles by submitting a resume and cover letter, participating in an interview, giving a speech to their peers at a team meeting, and being elected into the Student Leadership team. The goal of our Student Leadership subteam is to foster leadership skills in our members and expand the access to opportunity within our program, driving success both on and off the field. Currently, we have 2 roles on our Student Leadership team.

Our Team Captain oversees general team organization, creating and sharing announcements at every team meeting, guiding team culture. Our Team Captain is responsible for organizing thank you notes, delegating new opportunities, and leading by example.

Our Communications Facilitator shares a weekly update with our whole team about upcoming events, and manages sign ups for our outreach events. Our Communications Facilitator is the go-to leader for students who have questions about events or scheduling, and they lead from behind, making sure no one gets left behind.

Wrapping Up

We look forward to participating in the Open Alliance during our rookie season, and hope our story makes a difference for someone seeking inspiration to begin their own rookie journey in the future! We look forward to competing alongside all of you during the 2024 Crescendo Season!

[karomata]

Preseason Update

We’ve had a busy preseason so far! We’ve focused on building wide to create ample future opportunities.

Robots!

We’ve built 2 drive bases - one tank drive and one swerve.

We received a generous donation of robot parts from our friends at Code & Circuit who had parts from former team FRC5556 who discontinued in 2020. These robot parts, in tandem with a new AndyMark KOP frame, have come together to create our tank drive robot. We have 2 CIMs powering the drive train with Talon SR motor controllers. Our control system is composed of an original RoboRIO, and we have a CTRE PD Board.

Our swerve drive uses REV MAX Swerve modules, driven by NEOs and steered by 550s. We are using SPARK motor controllers and a RoboRIO 2.0 with a REV PDH. These materials are all brand new!

Vision

We’ve been familiarizing ourselves with FRC vision capabilities, working with AprilTags, PhotonVision and a Limelight!

Expanding Partnerships

We feel incredibly fortunate to have such a supportive and empowering school district. Our team works in a 2500 ft lab where 5 engineering courses are taught during school, a separate section that houses a robotics shop, and there is an additional open space for robot testing. We are recipients of the Massachusetts Skills Capital Grant program, which will result in a $75k budget to furnish our shop with industry grade equipment when the bill is signed. We intend to purchase a CNC router, mill, lathe, waterjet cutter, drill and much more!

We’ve also had an upgrade to our space! We are being given an additional classroom in which we can host a field. This is an exciting expansion that will provide our program much room to grow in future years, and we look forward to the new opportunities this space will bring us.

Lastly, we’ve laid groundwork to grow FIRST within Pentucket Regional School District. Next year, we’re starting an FTC program for 7th and 8th Grade students in our school, working name Lynx Robotics, and a district-wide FLL team, working name RoboCats, hosted out of our space, that will be able to spin off new FLL teams in elementary schools in each of our 3 towns. This year, we have integrated FLL curriculum into our Middle School Engineering & Robotics classes, and look forward to using REV’s Intro to Robotics curriculum to integrate FTC into other engineering courses offered.

Outreach

In our infancy, we have defined community outreach as a vital and key characteristic of our team. We’ve participated in and run multiple outreach events so far, including volunteering with a local food pantry, demonstrating our robot, organizing and FRC Kickoff, and running a blood drive out of our shop!

Award Submissions

We submitted our first award submission! Our Awards subteam created a Safety Animation and submitted it for the Safety Animation Award! We plan to post it on our YouTube channel.

Excited for Kickoff!

We can’t wait for our rookie season to officially begin in January! We look forward work playing on the field with many of the local teams who have supported our journey so far!

[karomata]

End of Preseason Update

We finished out our preseason strong, completing our swerve drive and hosting an open house with families, mentors and our community in attendance. We have also further iterated on our vision code, allowing the robot to not only turn towards an AprilTag, but also to follow it to maintain a consistent distance from the tag. We look forward to implementing both of these features into our competition robot this year.

[karomata]

Kickoff Update

Crescendo is here and we’re ready to go! This looks to be a really well built game that took the best concepts from the Game Design winners and integrated them smoothly, with some new challenges as well!

We had the pleasure of experiencing our first Kickoff with our friends FRC1474 Titans from Tewksbury, MA. Hosting Kickoff at our school, we shared breakfast, gave tours of our space, and participated in ice breakers. After the broadcast, we completed rules analysis together before we got pushed out by inclement weather.

Though our Kickoff was cut short, we did get to analyze our design priorities, which we currently have defined as the following:

NEED TO HAVE
-Mobility (Tank Drive)
-Speaker Scoring
-Onstage Climb (without Trap positioning)
-Ground Pickup
NICE TO HAVE
-Swerve
-Amp Scoring
-Vision
-Fit Under Stage
BELLS & WHISTLES
-Harmony Climb
-Trap Scoring
-Source Pickup

[karomata]

Week 1 Update

We’ve had a busy week 1, dodging snow storms and prototyping mechanisms! We built the kitbot immediately to learn more about how the notes fly through the air and to get a sense of how difficult it would be to score in the speaker. We attached the upper structure of the kitbot to our preseason robot, Hydrogen.

Note Shooting
We found that shooting into the speaker from the subwoofer to be a little easier that we initially expected, and that paradigm shift adjusted our expectations for the game. With the kitbot shooter, we struggled to push Hydrogen up against the subwoofer in a position that would fail to score in the speaker. Given this, we believe the amp will be more impactful in determining separating the field at competition.

Climbing Onstage
We obtained a grab hook, a tool used in industrial applications to hook chain. It’s essentially a hook with specified measurements that align with chain dimensions that allows it to grab a chain and restrict the hook from sliding forward or backwards on the chain. In our testing, it was hugely effective at grabbing the chain cleanly, resisting motion on the chain, and holding it’s grabbed position on the chain. We plan to move forward with a grab hook for use of climbing onto the stage.

Ground Pickup
Learning from the Ri3D designs and after testing a few different options through our own prototyping, we have decided that using a wheeled intake with belts is the most effective way to obtain and hold notes.

Robot Design
We found many of our goals and priorities in our robot design aligned well with Cranberry Alarm’s Ri3D design, though there were a few key things we wanted to improve.

Firstly, we feel comfortable pursuing swerve drive given our experience with it in preseason, and believe it will make a substantial difference in our ability to be competitive in Crescendo.

Second, we are designing a shooter that will have some adjustability in the angle, using a pneumatic cylinder to move our shooter between 60 degrees and 35 degrees. Our math and the kitbot show that a 60 degree angle allows robots to score in the speaker from base of the subwoofer very reliably, and that with some assistance, we believe that same angle could be used to score in the amp. The 35 degree angle will allow us to shoot from the podium where we can be protected from defense.

Third, we want add an additional mechanism that will close off the opening to the amp, allowing us to shoot from the 60 degree angle into the amp and retain the note inside, causing it to fall down appropriately. We are still evaluating the correct way to do this, but were largely inspired by Cranberry Alarm’s testing with this method.

[karomata]

Week 2 Update

We made great progress this week working with some of our local friends and taking big steps in our design.

Shooter Prototyping
After playing with the kitbot shooter on our tank drive practice robot, Hydrogen, we found that having the note spin against a surface when shooting resulted in a dramatic loss of power in the shot. Theoretically, this shooter structure is losing half of its power into spinning the note against the opposite wall. Unlike the frisbees of Ultimate Ascent, the notes don’t really have an ability to fly because they can’t capture the air in a concave geometry. We also tried the kitbot shooter with and without the compression bar, and we found that more compression is better.

These discoveries led us to try having 2 wheels, one on either side of the note. The goal is to ‘chuck’ the note using high speed and compression rather than spin it into flight.

This proved more effective than 2 wheels, but as we upgraded our prototype from CIMs to NEO Vortexes, we found that the Vortexes had way too much speed to effectively launch the note. We found the singular pair of wheel simply tore at the outer layer of the note. This helped us understand the appeal of many of the Ri3D shooters, having 2 wheels on either side, allowing us to speed up more gradually while still achieving the chucking trajectory versus the spinning shot.

This prototype, with 4 wheels, the first set running at half speed and the outer set running at full, has been our most effective design to date. Acknowledging some of our shop equipment limitations and novice nature as rookies, we have decided to move forward with this design despite some interesting data coming from shooters that have flywheels above and below the note. We recognize a need to work within our capability level and to ensure we have the time to refine our solutions instead of continuing to pursue concepts.

Overall Design

While our design continues to adapt as we construct it, the general layout has remained the same. Largely inspired by Cranberry Alarm, but with a few upgrades that we believe will make our robot more competitive and unique, we have begun cutting out parts (shout out to our friends FRC4909 for their help fabricating our polycarb components!) and assembling our robot.

Climbing, In Theory
We can’t wait for our climbing components to arrive from Thriftybot!

Attempting to make an Impact
We are crafting our Impact Submission with involvement from every member of our team. Though we are ineligible for this award as rookies, we are learning best practices and look forward to showcasing our teams impact at competition. We are writing and producing a full Impact Award submission, involving every student on our team. All of our team members take part in our outreach, and we are excited to have every member share their experience making a difference in our community!

[karomata]

Week 3 Update

Some ups and downs this week as we transition from CAD concept to build realities. We did not have every question answered or every problem solved before migrating to building our robot, which in addition to some inevitable unforeseen issues caused a bit of a slowdown.

Polishing up our CAD

As we continued to troubleshoot and address arising issues, we took the opportunity to clean up our CAD and focus on making sure it represented the robot we had actually built as much as possible. Being a rookie, our plan to was aim well within our capabilities for robot design, and to blitz towards building so we have the opportunity to fail fast and troubleshoot, knowing we were extra susceptible to making mistakes or misjudgments that would require adjustment and modification.

Learning Pneumatics by Doing Pneumatics


We took our first steps into using pneumatic cylinders to lift our shooter from our 35 degree angle to our 60 degree angle. After many rounds of trigonometry, we found that playing with mounting locations and cylinder extension limits in person gave us the clearest results. In the coming week, building out the pneumatic system will be a high priority as we have never used pneumatics before.

Driver Practice in the Den
We had the opportunity to do driver practice with our friends FRC5459 Ipswich Tigers. Having a half field in a dedicated space is a huge asset and we are thrilled to be able to share it with all of local teams who have and continue to support our growth as a team!

[karomata]

Week 4 Update

This week brought a some considerable progress and presented some new issues. We have assembled the majority of our robot, continued waiting for our climber to arrive, and discovered some unforeseen challenges.

Shooter
We’ve committed to our mounting points and connected our pneumatic system. So far, we are happy with the way this works and have begun discussing how we would control this system from a UI perspective.

Intake
We completed some initial testing with our intake which resulted in multiple new obstacles. Initially, we were experimenting with lower power levels on our NEO 550s to run the intake and quickly found that they hardly function without the needed gear reduction. After mounting the gear reductions, we had some success intaking the note. We also found that we severely lacked the power needed to lift our intake arm, using a NEO at a 3:1. We ordered a 125:1 gear reduction to give us as many options as possible with the other gearboxes we have in stock, and are currently waiting on it to arrive to further test our intake.

Wiring

Through many false starts, we finally landed on a wiring scheme that we found effective and manageable. Running 2 ‘super highways’ of wire underneath our shooter into the belly pan, we were able to remove wire crossings from many concerning pinch points. We also standardized our approach, laying out our PDH connections similar to the layout of the robot itself. We also have looked at implementing a universal labeling system, that would identify each powered component as [Component Shorthand/PDH or RIO Input/CAN ID] (Example: FL-D/10/6).

[Liu346]

Wow is that a Quad Vortex Shooter!! Would love to see some video of that if you guys have any.

[Padraig]

Sadly we don’t… we just finished up the robot yesterday

[Kevin_Leonard]

Will we be seeing you all at week 0?

[karomata]

Yes, we will be there! Looking forward to it.

[karomata]

Week 5 & 6 Update

Hi Everyone! Sorry for the missed updates - we’ve been working away at our robot!

Climber
Our climber was our last big mechanism we needed to complete, and we had a lot of trial and error getting it to function. We purchased 2 Thriftybot Telescoping tube kits, with the goal of using both on the outsides of our robot with a single hook over the robot to simplify climbing.

We had an issue with one of our constant force springs that caused it to unwind with a larger radius than all of the others. We still aren’t sure how we caused this issue, but we learned through the process of solving the issue that we did not need both to have the climber function. From there, we had to do extensive trial and error mathematically to figure out what the correct extension length was for each stage.

We determined that our robot sits 4.75" off the ground, from the surface of the ground to the top surface of our frame. From there, we need to have the climber fit underneath the chain at 28.75" so that we can drive underneath the core, to give ourselves some wiggle room we targeted 28". We also needed our intake to be able to pass the note into the shooter underneath the climber, so we had to find a sweet spot that worked with all of those constraints. Through trial and error, we learned that other constraints existed, such as needing to accommodate the spool in the channel based on how our climber is designed, and that the stages are each offset .75" from each other, causing additional height. We found ourselves running into the weeds on some calculations, such as figuring out what instances our robot would remain off the ground if we were poorly balanced. At one point, we attempted to target a level of lift that would make it physically impossible for the robot to contact the ground no matter how tilted it was on the chain, but we realized that it was not practical to achieve this with our current geometry and climbing method.

One of the things we did not closely consider was how the moving shooter would interfere with the climber and vice versa. We lucked out though!

Our climber was by far our least tested, least pre-designed, and most thrown together element of our robot. We did get considerably lucky in many ways regarding how some elements just fit together or did not cause interference, but we have found that next year, breaking off into subgroups to build out specific mechanisms would be strongly preferable to a single mechanism becoming the last one we put together and getting a rush treatment. All things considered, we are pretty happy with how it came out!

We have a robot name!
Our team voted to name our robot Neon! ICYMI, we named all our robots after elements, in line with being the ‘Aluminum’ Panthers. We chose Neon due to it’s connection with music culture - think of the neon lights on Beale St that give it an iconic aesthetic.

[karomata]

Week Zero Update

We had a great run at Week Zero! We were so excited to get in after being second on the waitlist, and it was an invaluable opportunity for our rookie team to learn the ropes before heading into official competition.

We were excited to debut our new team jerseys and drive our first competition robot, Neon! Week Zero also marked our first time being an Alliance Captain and competing in eliminations, when we ranked 12th at the end of qualifications and shifted up to 8th Seed Alliance Captain.

Robot Functionality
We were thrilled with our robot performance! Despite never being fully tested, our climber turned out to be one of our most reliable features. We climbed in all but one match we played, and proved our robot able to climb both in the center low point of the chain as well as towards the ends without sliding down.

Our shooter proved capable, but with room to improve. We scored roughly 75% of shots we took, but with opportunity to improve our transfer of power from our shooter wheels to the note’s speed. We noticed a seam was being carved into our lower 2 shooter wheels due to the note peeling out on contact, and the seam itself was where the seam in the note was located on contact.

Our intake saw improvement throughout the day. Our initial angle between our intake wheels proved too low, which we remedied by adding a posilock behind our intake to add space between the intake and the bumper. This propped our intake further forward and gave us more space for the note to fit under our outer rollers. Throughout the course of competition, our gear that drives our intake arm slipped off of the axle it was on. We had to sand down an axle on an older motor we received from FRC5556 to fit the existing hex gear we had. It was never an ideal fit, but it was what we had access to at the time. During the competition, it vibrated off of the axle and had to use an arbor press (thanks to the host team FRC509 for lending theirs!) to get it securely back on. We have since changed the motor used for this as well as the axle and gear driving the intake arm.

Overall, we had a great time, performed better than we expected, and took a lot away from this experience! We hope to be able to embrace the opportunity to participate at Week Zero every year. Thanks for our Alliance Partners FRC509 and FRC8567 for working with us!

[karomata]

Preparing for Week 1 at Granite State
We’re gearing up for our first event, feeling excited and decently well prepared! We’ve put in a lot of driver practice time, refined our amp shot, made a few code and sensor upgrades, and put together our pit!

Pit

We’ve assembled a basic pit to get us through our rookie season. In the long term, we are interested in investing in a Super Pit, but until then, we’re excited about what we were able to put together on a budget. We custom build a display stand using an old library cart, a double screen mounting bar and 2 TVs.

Banquet & Robot Reveal Gala
We had our inaugural Team Banquet & Robot Reveal Gala, where we revealed our robot to our families, sponsors, and community. Our students recognized our mentors and got to share with our guests how much our team means to them. It was a great night that reminded all of us why we are here.

Reveal Video
We have a reveal video! Come check it out!

FRC9443 Aluminum Panthers 2024 Robot Reveal - Neon

[karomata]

Granite State District Event Update
This past weekend we attended our first official competition at Granite State! We had a great time and felt an incredibly warm welcome into the NE FIRST community!

Qualifications
Through some ups and downs, we ended qualifications at rank 16 but spent most of our time bouncing around the top 10. We had a generally favorable match schedule which helped, but I believe our ranking was also largely supported by our robot performance overall.

In our first qualification match, we had a note get stuck in our robot. This was not a new issue to us, as we had experienced the same issue at Week Zero and while practicing on our practice field. It was on our list of fixes from Week Zero, however extensive testing during between the events left us unsatisfied with any of the solutions.

We had considered 2 primary options: a note shield made of a polycarbonate sheet that would allow our intake the feed a jammed note into the shooter and get rid of it, or a servo with a thin arm that would catapult notes out of our robot through the side. We struggled to get the note shield to work as we hoped, and the complexity of the note catapult kept us from mounting the mechanism to the robot among all of our other tasks.

Panicked from our experience in our first match, we hastily added a note shield, which in retrospect we believe may have been a mistake. By adding the note shield, we affected the range our intake arm could move in and caused the rollers to rub against the note shield when feeding the note into the shooter. This caused further issues with our shooter reliability, autonomous modes, etc. We spent the majority of the event fighting these issues with some success, getting our 4 piece autonomous mode to work during roughly 5 matches on Friday. Looking back on this, I think this is a classic case of overreacting to an issue that could happen to just about any team with random chance, and too quickly implementing a cure without considering if it was worse than the disease it’s meant to stop. We’ve learned from this experience and are building a new note shield that will avoid these existing issues but still provide the benefits we seek.

Additional issues we faced included maintaining pressure in our tanks while waiting for the match to start and increasing our robot speed to stay competitive. We added a turbo speed and coded our autonomous to not start until the pressure in the tank was at an appropriate level to fix both of these issues.

Eliminations
Despite a tough final match, we were ecstatic to be selected by FRC1922 and FRC4909 as their 3rd robot. They were both incredible teams to work with, and we hope to have the opportunity to work with both these teams again!

We ultimately placed 3rd in the double elimination bracket. Match after match, we were taking strong hits that resulted in significant damage to our pneumatic lifts, swerve modules, and intake. It feels like after every match we rushed off the field for a repair in the pit or in queue. Eventually, our robot’s injuries caught up with us when tread on one of our swerve wheels ripped off in match 13 of eliminations, which rendered our robot almost uncontrollable, and we retreated to an early climb unable to effectively cycle. It was one of the worse ways to go out at a competition, but we were incredibly grateful for all of the great matches we had with our alliance partners leading up to that match.

Rookie All Star!

We were incredibly honored to receive the Rookie All Star Award from the judges! We are so excited to be a part of this community and feel empowered both by the machine we have built and the impact we have made in our community, and look forward with sharing both facets of our team at District Championships and beyond, while finding new ways to expand our capabilities and impact in future years.

We look forward to competing again at North Shore!

[Kevin_Leonard]

We loved playing with 9443 in quals together, and it’s so awesome to see a rookie team start out so strong!

@karomata

Despite a tough final match, we were ecstatic to be selected by FRC1922 and FRC4909 as their 3rd robot.

9443 was incredible, and should not have fallen as far as you did in the draft. We had you 10th on our overall picklist and were terrified when 1922-4909-9443 formed as one of the scariest alliances in the tournament.

[krbonner]

Absolutely loved watching the official 9443 debut at GS. Great work to all!

[karomata]

North Shore Update

We had a great run at North Shore! Overall, we ended qualifications ranked 4th and became the 3rd seed Alliance Captain. We picked FRC2370 and FRC348 to join us in the elimination rounds and finished 3rd in match 13.

Auto
Aside from extensive repairs following Granite State, we spent nearly all of our time between our competitions dialing our autonomous routines and getting our 2 vision systems up and running, including Limelight based note detection! We approached North Shore with 4 auto routines.

We never used our amp side taxi auto, as we found ourselves more often than not being one of the stronger autonomous performers in our matches. Our 4 piece from the subwoofer continued to work reliably, and we did not have many opportunities to use our centerline 4 piece. While being entirely non-productive, we found our centerline defensive auto to be highly effective at stopping the opposing alliance from scoring notes from the centerline.

Teleop
We continued to refine our driving capability and cycle speed. At this event we were able to traverse under the stage, which made a huge difference when navigating the field. In a considerable number of our matches, we made up a majority of notes scored for the melody rank point. We also demonstrated our new amp scoring capabilities. While not our strongest feature, we used it multiple times to enable our alliance to do the co-op. We were thrilled to set a high score during qualifications! It was later beat in elims.

Climbing
Our climber was highly effective at North Shore, and it felt as though we were one of the most versatile harmony climb robots at the event. Our simple yet effective design has proved very accommodating of other robots and we rarely have an issue climbing with another team. In our last match on Saturday, a driver miscommunication resulted in our climber getting smashed, and we had to remove the climber from the robot to make repairs overnight. Our climber was returned to full functionality on Sunday morning but we incurred another issue that prevented us from climbing through most of elims. We will likely have to rebuild the entire climber for district champs.

Rookie Inspiration!
We were honored to receive the Rookie Inspiration Award. Our pit representative team was smaller than usual at North shore due to a number of our students who participated in the musical which was also this weekend, but the small group we had did an amazing job. We look forward to continuing to share our story and take inspiration from teams like our alliance partners FRC2370 IBOTS, who we were ecstatic to see win their first Impact Award!

So now what?
We are optimistic that we will be competing District Championships and look forward to attending as Rookie All Star recipients. We aren’t sure how competitive we will be at District Champs, but hope to perform well regardless!

Thanks to FRC8724 and FRC3467 for helping us with scouting data for alliance selections, and to our partners FRC2370 and FRC348 for some great elimination matches!

[karomata]

District Championships Update

What a weekend we had at NE District Championships! We had many highs and lows, but persevered through the tougher moments and rose to the challenge at many different points.

Qualification Matches
Our strategy at District Championships was to be the ideal robot for each alliance pairing we had. This varied from our strategy at our last event, North Shore, where we approached each match with the goal of maximizing rank points in each match. We understood that the competition would be tougher at the District Championship level, and that it was unlikely that we would rank high enough to be an Alliance Captain, so our goal was to show off what we could do and demonstrate versatility. We had made a few key upgrades to our robot since our last event.

We added vision both for note detection and auto aim for ranged shots on the speaker. Our note detection proved highly effective, allowing us to adapt to various situations in autonomous and offering the ability to target notes in teleop, which proved useful in situations where we couldn’t see the note we were trying to pick up. Our auto aim was fully functional on the code end, but the unreliability of our shooter from a distance resulted in us being unable to use it effectively. On Friday, we spent a few hours on the practice field trying to dial in our shots, but could not consistently produce the same shot at the distance we needed.

We had also worked on dialing in our amp shot at District Champs, and got it to work very reliably. It proved hugely beneficial, as using the amp became more and more important as the competition evolved.

Eliminations
We ended qualifications ranked 15th in our division. Though we were unsure if we would be picked in Alliance Selections, we were proud of how much we had achieved as a rookie team. We were excited to be picked by the 4th place alliance, joining FRC1153 and FRC78 in the elimination round. We got knocked out after two matches, but were proud to have the honor to participate at eliminations at such a high level of competition.

Rookie All Star Interview
Since North Shore, a group of students had been preparing to represent our team in the Rookie All Star Interview at District Championships, and they did a great job! It was awesome to hear from students how impactful our team had been to them as participants and to our community broadly. We had prepared our students with a cart to take into their interview that had props from many of our adventures this season and two slideshows that captured our journey up to this point, including a full Impact binder with our Impact submission and documentation.

We’ve incredibly proud of all of the outreach work our team has done this season, and how we are making a different and spreading FIRST in our community. To learn more about our outreach, please see our published short list.

Outcomes
We were honored to receive the Rookie Inspiration Award. We had hoped to win Rookie All Star and to have the opportunity to compete for the award at World Championships, but are grateful and humbled to have received recognition at this high level of competition. We ended the competition at rank 35 in New England, which is incredibly impressive for a rookie team, but unfortunately a bit short of qualifying for World Championships. Our season is ending, but we have no shortage of inspiration for offseason projects and are excited for next year.