Team 2818 (G-FORCE) just came back from competing at the MD event in La Plata MD. It was a long trip (4 hrs each way) but with a great outcome.
We got all the way to the finals (somehow) but ended up trailing behind in the last of the three playoff matches. Congratulations to FTC #0177 (Twisted Bots) and their winning alliance.
It was a wild ride with several “issues” with field controls, but the CSM team (lead by Jeff Tjiputra) did a great job, and it was a really fun event.
G-FORCE was also wildly pleased to win the “Inspire award”, which gets us an invite to Worlds.
Hey Jon, maybe we’ll get a re-match…
I’m going to add that remote power switch
Phil.
Thanks to the College of Southern MD, and BAE systems for sponsoring the event.
Congratulation to Team 2818 (G-FORCE) on their Inspire Award. I also want to thank the College of Southern MD, and BAE systems and all the volunteers for the great event.
Phil,
We’ll look forward to seeing you at Worlds. Hopefully together we can figure out more of the motor controller/encoder issues before then. I think the Blutooth gets blamed for a lot problems that are due to the motor controller lockups. In one of our qualifying rounds, the autonomous went haywire and the robot didn’t move for a full minute of teleop. Then the driver remembered the switch and off we went. It looks like a field issue but it’s not.
In retrospect, we should have picked your team for our alliance. Scouting was truly a nightmare with four fields going at one time in any order.
Based on that observation I’d agree. We had the same thing happen to us in our third round… Autonomous stalled part the way through, and then Nothing worked in teleop. We weren’t sure if the program didn’t transition, or if the field or controller had bailed on us.
It looks like there is a hard failure mode in the controller that sometimes can’t recover. (Short of a power reset). Not being able to power-reset the NXT after a long wait prior to a match is a bit concerning as well.
An interesting point is that when our mega-fail happened, we also couldn’t move our bucket, which is a sepparate Speed Controller on it’s own NXT port. It might be a failure where the controller is swamping the I2C bus???
In retrospect, we should have picked your team for our alliance.
I didn’t want to say it. We WOULD have accepted
Scouting was truly a nightmare with four fields going at one time in any order.
We’ve also re-thought our scouting based on what we saw. We think we’ll give each scout a small group of teams to “own” and have them rank that smaller set. We also think it’s a good idea to note the best robot in the losing alliance each game. These may drop down the list purely due to bad pairings… but they may make a great second-pick. This is something that the coach can do after each match.
There is really only one Twisted Bots team. However we have two robots. Members of the team worked on either robot as required. The same two members programmed both bots. Robot 3165 scores in the circle goal while Robot 177 scores in the High Triangle goal.
At the Virginia Tournament in December, we split our team and ran two robots, 177 and 3165. At that tournament 3165 won the Inspire Award and 177 was on the Winning Alliance (1st pick). 3165 was the captain of the Finalist Alliance.
At the Delaware Tournament, a subset of the Twisted Bots took 3165 and competed. We were 2nd ranked and picked by Power Surge and were part of the Winning Alliance.
At the Maryland Tournament the entire team competed with 177. We were Captain of the Winning Alliance.
Although we qualified as both Twisted Bots (177) and Twisted Bots 2 (3165) we will all be competing at Worlds as Twisted Bots (177), although JMT will be spending most of her time with FRC 122 the NASA Knights.
