In March of 2022, Pandamaniacs broke a curse that was old enough to buy a lottery ticket, finally bringing home its first judged award and its first event win after 19 years of competing in FRC. I described it as hell freezing over.
In June of 2022, every mentor with the program besides me departed the team to start teaching in other districts or tend to family needs. It’s the type of shift that kills most teams, no matter how old they are and what momentum they’re carrying.
After a brief thrash, we found two teachers willing to step up. And then we started adding a handful of wonderful industry mentors. And then one of those teachers had to take off from November through the end of January for FMLA. Those of you familiar with the FRC schedule understand that’s bad news for a team. It was through a lot of grace and the determination of a French teacher turned rookie mentor that we even made it to Kickoff.
With our wits about us and an unusually limited build schedule, we tried to develop a mechanism to collect cubes and score them on the field, leaving cones to partners on our alliance. We worked on this with all our might, before we reached the Tuesday before our first district event and the intake just. would. not. fit. Cue an evening of panic CAD to take parts we’d already made so we could load from the human player station and drop cubes low. We machined and assembled it the next night, turning a pneumatic cube launcher into a semi-plausible-looking cube pooper. It would at least be more points than we scored the year before. If you look at it closely, you can tell where we started grafting this on to the original plan.
We loaded the trailer the night after, and went full send into the start of our time in the Peachtree District. That year I spent in Indiana and its district a few years ago was informative–I knew roughly what we needed to string together in order to qualify for the District Championship. While the judged award didn’t happen for us to boost us in Anderson and we finished out of the points in the bracket, ending up as a high seed and an alliance captain certainly set us up for a bubble spot.
And then the wheels fell off at our second event in Hartsville. A combination of pressure to make the show and the absolute worst match schedule I’ve seen in 20 years of doing this left us seeded dead last, happy to be a second-round pick, and ultimately seeded 77th of 144 teams in the Peachtree District. We were well short of district championship, and the disappointment after a long grind of a season had about broken us all.
With a week or two of time to decompress, we started looking toward the SCRAP tournament and toward ways to improve ol’ Blocky Balboa. We unmounted everything above the drivetrain and started to focus on CAD work to build a proper arm to pick up from the ground and score. It was a simple enough design, a single-joint design that let us experiment with both the CNC router and the shockingly good REV Robotics ION platform for transmitting power. The kids have worked basically nonstop since April on this, only taking time off around exams and the first week of summer. The whole thing finished assembly on Thursday night, and everything looked good! We even shot a snazzy teaser video demonstrating what the arm could accomplish.
Of course, no Pandamaniacs story can be that straightforward.
We somehow missed that the whole thing made us a good six inches too tall, and whether it was confidence or hubris or faith we left the old cube pooper assembly at the school. That forced us into a crash redesign in the pits of the event that was shockingly decent in concept, a shorter arm with the intake clearanced for the bumper. With things freshly cut down and fitting, we took the first in the first qualification match of the day. The autonomous routine didn’t pop out the cube, but at least we drove well…in that part. Turned out that driving over the small bump on the field knocked loose a CAN connection to make it intermittent, leaving us unable to drive half of the robot for the whole match. First time we’ve seen that all season.
The funny thing about small off-season events like SCRAP is that on average, you’re on the field every third match (18 teams, 6 robots per match). Troubleshooting the bum connector took time, then we tore into why the intake wasn’t running. Some tiny assembly differences jammed up the whole works, and by the time we got to assembling it again we were in no state to make our second qualification match. That put us in the lunch break, giving us a slight chance to catch up. And then we whacked the intake so hard it sheared rivets and made it end the match at a 90-degree angle to where it’s supposed to be.
That was the story of the qualification rounds, a story of the shoulder joint skipping chain, snapping chain, and generally unable to score more than one cube per match. We supplemented it with pushing cubes using our drivetrain, then doing a little blocking as best we could with an utterly uncontrollable arm that would be a magnet for fouls if driven poorly. One attempt to hold it up for safer defense left us tipped on our back, bending the sprocket like a potato chip–and the spare we bought was nowhere in sight.
Through all of this, the pit was constantly busy but the vibe was perhaps the most relaxed I’ve ever seen. We just kept working the problems on a tight turnaround, beating the arm to our will as best we could. Flatten the sprocket back out, make a new loop of chain at record speed, keep fiddling with the intake or counterbalance springs. Later in the qualification rounds, we were at least able to score our preloaded cube–in a couple occasions, we got a fortunate enough bounce that it landed in the upper nodes for maximum points. But it wasn’t much, leaving us seeded 16th of 18 if memory serves me right.
But at an event where the playoff bracket is six alliances of three teams each, you’re inherently making the show. We end up as the second pick of the 6th-seeded alliance, alongside captain Webb Robotics from Knoxville and Technical Terminators from Marion. Webb brought a stout, nicely-sorted swerve drive scoring machine, while Technical Terminators are more old-school with an 80/20-based mecanum drive with the old DART actuators to score game pieces up high. Being the lowest seed in the bracket, I was pretty chill about our prospects.
And then we knocked off the 3 seed.
And then we knocked off the 2 seed.
And then we knocked off the 5 seed, putting us in the finals against the 1 seed that fought back through the lower bracket.
All through this, we leaned on Webb’s expertise on working with the new-to-us 25 chain to make the most out of the limitations of our system. With turnbuckles and tensioners and continuously just breathing on it, we could at least get it under control well enough to score low reliably.
Finals were a fight all to themselves. We had the first match won handily, but a rough red card situation gave our opponents the win and put us on the back foot. We had to win two straight to seal the deal. We landed a solid win in the second match, forcing a winner-take-all Finals 3.
The match unfolded well, and when we landed the triple balance we knew we had the match won…until we mysteriously rolled off along with Technical Terminators. The result came down to the slimmest of margins, a two-point win to clinch only the second tournament win of our 20-year history. As the absolute bottom seed.
It’s long been said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Our intake looks like it’s taken some haymakers, but I am incredibly fortunate to work with an incredible group of kids and mentors that keep answering the bell every single time. I don’t know if we’ll put Blocky Balboa back on the field again–we’ll see how recruitment and the fall events shape up–but I can’t wait to get back into the shop to start working on even more improvements with this cast of characters.
Thank you so much to 1466 and 1051 for picking us. 1466 was truly instrumental in getting this thoroughly thrashed arm to a state where it could survive the rest of the tournament, and 1051’s high-node operation was crucial to racking up the scores. Both were an absolute delight to work with in the pits and behind the glass.
Thank you to my fellow mentors who kept making themselves available to help drive this process forward and keep developing our capabilities. It sure wasn’t going to happen working from home.
Thank you to the FIRST South Carolina crew and volunteers for all your hard work to put on SCRAP. I’m one of the small (but growing) number of people in the state who knows what that takes, and the Sumter County Civic Center was a near perfect venue for this event. Easy layout, tons of space, clean restrooms, friendly faces.
(Aside: Thank you to Automation Direct for making these awesome trophies for the event. The cone spins and dances around–fun irony for a team that never scored one all year. It’s the wildest one I’ve seen from them, and they’ve done a lot over the years with the trophies for GRITS.)
And thank you to this absurd group of kids that make this team what it is. From our rising four-year seniors to the new kid who literally joined us Friday night, they show so much grit when things go sideways. There’s hope for the future, y’all.