I just wanted to get a nice picture we had of our robot this year out to the CD community. Team 294 is proud to present our 2014 robot: Wavelength.
Competing in a week 1 regional for the 2nd time in a row, we built off the prior year’s missteps and produced a robot which we all are immensely proud. Obviously inspired by our friends up in the great white north, we focused this year on design elegance and robot simplicity.
We have been very fortunate this year with a great showing at both the Inland Empire and the Los Angeles Regionals finishing as Finalist and Winners respectively.
We look forward to seeing all our friends at Champs this year as we finally earned our way back after having a couple years of just missing the big dance. In addition we look forward to the intense competition with all the great teams and hope to make even more friends this year at STL! We hope to represent California to the best!
Your robot was impressive at Los Angeles and Inland Empire, and improved a lot between regionals. You guys have a versatile robot that can play the midfield role really well.
I have a couple questions: it appears that you added the orange centering/ball positioning bar for LA as I don’t see it in the IE picture. If this is indeed the case, how did this work out for you? Were there any other modifications you made to your claw? To me, it seemed to grab the ball a bit better at LA than IE so it seemed to work out pretty well. Do you plan on making any more changes for championships?
Congratulations of your win. It’ll be good having you guys at champs.
Thanks for the comments.
The orange bars enabled our drivers to not have to align perfectly to the ball every time. This allowed us to intake some more angles than at IE. In addition when we shot, the bars helped the ball stay centered on the shooter. So basically it worked really well!
Other changes we made were to increase the size of the shooting plate. In I.E. you can see we had a small diameter plate. In LA we had a 6in plate which dramatically increased the shooter energy transfer.
Finally the most important thing we did was invest in drive practice. Many thanks to Team 330 to providing a place for us to practice as they have a great field.
For champs again its mainly investing in drive practice and small improvements to reliability and robustness to heavy defense.
Hope to see you guys there!
You guys seem to be doing a lot of lounging around.
Yep… That’s how we roll! Even robots need a break now and again!! 
I think 687’s chair bot was more effective
Too many chairs in 2014 for team 294 