Mechanical Mayhem, Team 1519, would like to say a big THANKS to all the people that were involved in the planning, organizing, setup, refereeing, field reset, pit admin, and all the other aspects of this event!
This was a great inaugural event, with a tremendous amount of potential to grow into a major fall event! The location was excellent, with Western New England College hosting the entire event in a large gym allowing for everything to be in the one big room, including the registration, pits, field, and stands.
Despite some initial troubles with the field before the first match, the event crew did a fantastic job keeping the matches moving along, while being polite and helpful to teams. Refereeing was fair and consistent resulting in all teams being content with the officiating, as far as we could tell.
We were impressed by a number of robots that we had not yet seen in the tournaments we had attended this year, including Rosie Robotics (839) regularly running 3-4 lines in autonomous mode and doing a great job running laps for a full-size robot, and Rage (173) with a herder with an extremely effective ball-dislodging mechanism.
The 2-on-2 format was a fun twist on the “Overdrive” game, making it easier for hurdling teams to get access to a ball (no ball contention) and easier for teams to run laps, since there were less robots to potentially cause traffic jams. Our “Speed Racer” really enjoyed the less crowded track, regularly turning 12-14 laps in teleop mode and 6 to 8 lines in autonomous. (Our best match of the day was 8 lines in auto with 15 laps.)
For the elimination rounds, all of the teams at the tournament participated on an alliance. The draft was done in serpentine fashion, with the requirement that alliance captains pick outside of the “alliance captain” teams in order to prevent powerhouse alliances. (We think this is a great idea for small tournaments where all teams can be on alliances for the elimination rounds.)
The alliances were of three teams, with only two of the teams competing at a time in 2-on-2 format. Alliances were required to mix in all three robots in the first two matches of the “best of 3” elimination rounds. The #1 seeded alliance only had two robots, meaning they didn’t need to mix in a third robot, but leaving them with no backup in case of mechanical failure.
Alliances were as follows:
- 1519, 173
- 839, 1027, 176-B
- 228, 176, 2523
- 237, 173-B, 238
The awards:
- Number 1 Seed: 1519
- Play of the Day: 173 - Regular dislodging of the ball and catching it on the way down!
- Referee Award: 839 - For Gracious Professionalism in helping another team rebuild their robot!
- Team Spirit: 237
- Human Player Competition: A pair of players from 228 and 1027 teamed up to win this award!
- High Scoring Average: 1519
- Event Finalists: 228, 176, 2523
- Event Winners: 1519, 173
An interesting thing to note about the winning alliance is that it was composed of a lap-bot and a herder – that’s right, they couldn’t hurdle or place a ball! (Thanks, 173, for being a great alliance partner, and possibly helping us make Overdrive history as the first non-hurdling alliance to win an event!)
We had a great time at the tournament and will try to encourage more NH teams to make the trek down to Springfield for next year!
The only suggestions we’d have for improving this event for next year would be to make the pit areas a little bit larger than the standard 10x10 since there was plenty of room to have the pits be a little larger, and to provide a separate electrical circuit for every few pit areas (the pits had all been on a single circuit with long extension cords, causing too much voltage drop for teams to charge batteries until quite a few teams moved their battery charging stations to other areas of the gym.)
Thanks again, Scott, and all of the other event hosts for putting on a fun, relaxed, exciting event! You can count on us to return again next year!
PS: We’ll try to get some photos online within the next few days.
