Team 1014 had a frustrating but ultimately rewarding competition in Cincinnati this weekend. The team got to demonstrate grace under pressure and learned lessons in dealing with adverse conditions. Did I mention frustrating?
Thursday we discovered that the bolts on the bumpers were ever so slightly too small, and as a result we missed our first practice match. (Worth it, however, as the reversible bumpers are awesome! We can change bumper colors in about 10 seconds.) For the second practice match we could not connect to the field, so the robot sat. In the final practice match we finally got to run, and got a frisbee stuck under the robot. So we spent the next hour switching from 4" to 6" wheels. It was a really great example of teamwork, with more than 10 people contributing to complete a job that likely would have taken us most of a Saturday during the build season.
Friday dawned with much hope. We were confident of our shooting now and felt that we could get the 10 point climb working with just a little tweaking. The robot was tilted slightly to one side and just barely touching the ground while on the bar. (Close enough that twice the refs had to bust out the piece of paper to test it.) The robot began well, but we had an odd problem of it not shooting during the autonomous period. We figured out that the optical encoder on the shooter was not properly sending its speed signal telling the cam to fire a frisbee when the wheels got to the right speed, because the retroreflective tape had come off the wheel. We put some back in a hurry to make our next match and still the encoder wasn’t working. Thinking it might be a bad encoder, we quickly wrote some code telling the robot to fire if the motors ran for a full second without the encoder indicating that the wheel was back up to speed. Jon was not happy deploying the code without testing, but we were in a hurry. In the queue for the match, Dramble figured out that the retroreflective tape had been placed on the wheel reflective side down, which was why the encoder was not working. The match began and the best description of the robot behavior is probably modern interpretive dance. It would move forward, then spin in a circle, then turn in a arc, then stop, then move backward, … It turns out that every second it was pausing to see if the encoder was up to speed and executing whatever its last command was for a second. Unforced errors, not fun.
By the end of the day on Friday we had diagnosed a couple more simple problems and made some improvements to the climber so that it could easily hang for ten points. We went back to the hotel in pretty good spirits. We were 2-5 and near the bottom in the rankings, but had a lot of teleop disc scoring points, most of which were actually from our own robot scoring. We felt really sure that NOW our robot would work and if it did, we would get picked for eliminations.
So Saturday arrives, in the first match the robot scores two discs in autonomous and we are psyched. It runs down, picks up a load of discs, and it won’t fire. So we play defense and hang for 10 points. In the pit, we think we know what happened. The cam was working fine, so we looked at the bucket and it seemed to be loose and pulling up on the right side. We added a bolt and ran the cam again. Everything looked OK. So we go back out for a match and the shooter won’t fire again. Then it weekly spit out a frisbee. So back to defense and another hang. This time the drive team was convinced it was the bolt we had just added deforming the bucket, and that the first jam had just been bad luck. We took it out and ran everything. It all looked to be working. In retrospect, I should have investigated the fact that the first shooter wheel seemed to be speeding up and slowing down a little, but there was only 20 minutes between the matches and no time to be in depth. Last match of the day, playing with our sister (and top ranked) team 3324 and 1038. You guessed it, the shooter jams. Again. Dejectedly we walk off the court and take the robot back to the practice field. Where we discover a missing screw (most likely it first became loose and then eventually fell out) on the speed controller to the first shooter wheel. We replace it and fire off a bunch of frisbees in succession, from a few different angles. Problem solved, but our chances of being picked? Probably not so good.
But our friends form 3324 want to know if the robot is fixed. We tell them yes it is, and I add that I am 90% confident we have it solved. Then I joke that if they pick us “There is a reasonably good chance a meteor will strike your robot, or something bad will happen to it.” But we are thinking they will try to steal in and take us as their second pick, after getting 4085 (Reynoldsburg, a very nice shooting robot) in the first round. We figure that we have been averaging 7 frisbees made in teleop, when the shooter works, and between the three teams we have been averaging 29 teleop discs. But then 1038 surprises us and takes us in the first round. We are happy and they also get 1018, so it will be the team of tens (10-14, 10-38 and 10-18). They are both good shooters so the strategy is for us to play defense and just try to slow 1008 and/or 48 down and reduce the number of shooting cycles they can take. First elimination match starts and autonomous is OK. Then both of their robots have their shooters jam. And 1008 and 48 do a good job of driving, minimizing our defense. We lose. Both 1038 and 1018 get their shooters working again and we head back out. After autonomous we are behind but not decisively. Jon gets good defensive position on 1008’s very nice shooting robot for about 30 seconds, when 1018 and 1038 say “We’re broken again, you try to score.” We get in three shooting runs, and try to squeeze in a hang at the very last second but fail. We end up losing 65-85, though we shot well. Then I think about the meteor comment. Maybe it was our fault?
But the robot ends the competition in completely working order. The only thing we plan to work on over the week between Queen City and Buckeye is some coding and finding a replacement for our stolen RGB LED light strip. We are confident that the random, irritating programming, electrical, bumper and mechanical (it truly was “everybody’s fault” this weekend) problems are behind us. We are going to the Buckeye Regional next weekend (the first time in our history we will attend two regional competitions) and are as confident as we can be that the robot is in good working order.
On the way home, the alternator belt on the bus breaks, and the bus ends up powerless and stranded 3 feet off the highway until a replacement bus arrives.
Yeah, this was a real FRC weekend!
PS-Just for a little added fun, both I and the other teacher on the trip had the 24 hour stomach flu that has been ripping through our school.