Hello Chief Delphi! My name is LJ. I was the captain and mechanical lead of the off-season team Switchback. We competed today at the offeason competition Bunnybots.
We started this journey all the way back in September, when a local off-season was struggling to make the team minimum to put on the event. Me and a lot of my friends in PNW FRC considered entering a drivetrain to help them put on the event, but unfortunately they had to cancel it anyways.
We weren’t done though; the concept of putting a robot together with people from teams all across the Pacific Northwest was tempting, so we set out to figure out how to do it.
First, we tried to source everything ourselves from our own teams. We were fortunately able to get most of the electronics that way, but our drivetrain was consistently an issue. Who knew how many parts went into an FRC drivetrain?? We ended up putting out a temporary parts request asking for a drivetrain, as well as a couple other things. Due to the incredible kindness and generosity of 1540, we were able to get everything we needed!
Unfortunately, we had waited to ask until a week before the event, so it was crunch time. The Portland crew met up at my house to begin assembling the bot, but in doing so we realized how much we needed. We ended up assembling a gearbox, but nothing was physically done for the rest of the meeting.
On Wednesday, I assembled the majority of the drivetrain; the only thing we had for a bellypan was a container lid, so I had to cut into that, but it ended up being a good bellypan! It only broke in our final match. On Thursday, I took it over to a friend’s house as she was the only one who could wire the robot. She ended up wiring it overnight, and we mated it to the drivetrain on Friday during load-in. However, the code was not written. Around this time, we dubbed the robot Uno.
Saturday morning, we get there around 8:30 AM and begin working; I had to mount a pole, and there was no code yet for the robot. By 10:30 we had a drivebase that was wired and ready for programming to use. Due to issues involving our lent RoboRIO 2.0 though, we didn’t make a match until after lunch.
Our first match was really successful; we were with two high-performing teams (2471/2521) who definitely were the main reason we won. However the robot stayed in one piece, so we got back into queue and won another one! For what is essentially just a drivetrain, we were performing really well in the qualifiers; most of us expected to go to one or two matches and be done, but the robot was holding on! After making 5 matches, we ended qualifiers ranked 8th out of 26 teams.
Alliance selection was… stressful especially considering that none of us are involved with strategy on our actual teams, so there wasn’t a whole lot of precedent. We (surprisingly) got picked by 2374B, the second seeded alliance captain of the event. 4043 was our third pick, and 6443 was our backup bot.
We won our first match against the 3rd seed alliance (3674, 2521, and 7034) but lost our next two matches, ending in round 5 match 13, against my actual team.
Considering this bot didn’t exist a week ago, I’m really proud of what we accomplished; we build a fully functioning robot that competed and was one match away from the finals! And it was only a drivetrain! I cannot believe we made it as far as we did. I credit our amazing team both on-site and off-site; and though it took a lot of work to get here, Switchback to me is the epitome of the spirit of GP; we’re all here to build the robots; but we’re so much more than robots.
A HUGE THANK YOU TO:
1540!!! Thank you guys so much for supplying and supporting this fever dream, we couldn’t have made it without you.
6696!!! Thank you for supplying most of our electronics and batteries! We also would not have made it to competition if not for your generosity.
2471!!! Your batteries got us to semis and I am so grateful!
Thank you to 2374 for helping us during load-in get situated; we were in over our heads a tiny bit and i’m forever grateful for you.
And last but CERTAINLY not least, thank you to our alliance partners! It was awesome working with you guys, and you gave us an experience I definitely won’t forget.
And thank you to everyone who came by and was interested in our little robot! It was super cool to see the interest it gathered, and was really heartwarming to see so many people support our little experiment.
THANK YOU ALL! This is the end of this generation of Switchback; who knows, maybe another group will pick up the helm 
but you’ll see all of us around on our actual teams.
Sincerely,
Lj, 3636, Captain (Logistics, Robot)
Kai, 23383, Co-Captain (Logistics, Business)
Jonah, 3636, Electrical
Haylie, 6696, Mechanical
Seth, 955, Programming, HP
Ishaan, 6443, Programming
Andre, 955, Design/Fab
Gloria, 5975, Drive Coach
Charlie, 5975, Technician
Lauren, Driver
And a couple others who wanted to stay anonymous 
See you all at kickoff!
