Wow. We’re into district champs already this season…
Surely some folks have some wins they want to share.
My wins - made some progress at work on learning new parts of the stack. Which is nice.
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Vespa successfully titled/registered! Despite some tricky paperwork (and the stickers not being quite right), not a peep from the DMV.
I have now dumped over $300 into yet another project vehicle without even touching it 
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You have a problem.
Mostly that we don’t have pictures of the vespa now in your living room
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we’ll see.I survived my events 
And now that they’re over I had some time to wander around and see friends and family who I haven’t seen socially in months. I took the ferries for the first time in months, Today I had dinner at a good friend’s house, yesterday at a family member’s. It’s been nice having free time again!
The view from my parents room at the hotel they were staying at while in town, My office is in the massive building in center left. at the bottom of the closest corner. One of the largest 20 buildings on earth by square feet. - half a million square feet bigger than the pentagon even
It never feels that big when I’m around it, but when you see it from kilometers away, its size becomes apparent.
The first bridge from the ferry
View down the Bosphorus from when I got on the ferry today - they added a new funicular train from the hilltop to the waterside last year, and with it new ferry services, and it happened to be super convenient for me today
Very strange, but cool looking from afar new skyscraper financial center still under construction near my friend’s house.
I’m really happy I finally got out of the loop of PERPA-home and nothing else, or Hilton-Volkswagen, and nothing else. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the events too, but one of the reasons I love living in such a massive city is the ability to go see different things all the time, and now I’m taking full advantage Sunday I’ll go see a massive new library that was renovated from an old military barracks, I’m super excited about that
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I am going to worlds for the first time! My team is also going in the first time since 2018 and we were finalists and won EI!
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Hybrid rocket engine cold flow went well. Hot fire next!
On top of it 6672 is killing it at FIT Champs!
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Hit some major milestones this last week. Our rookie team is heading to Champs, and the logistics are all coming together finally. Registration, Flights, Rooms, Transport, etc. It’s a LOT of work! And the team is Doing a great job scraping $$ together. And we finally locked in a spot on a So Cal truck for our robot & pit stuff (thanks Joy - whew).
Last weekend at CAAV was 80% awesome (-10% CAN bus crap, -10% cracked wheels issue). Our new add-on Cubifier (aka Cubinart, Cube Pooper, tailgate party…) worked great. Ranked 4th, made 2nd Alliance, and made it to match 12 - 4th place I think? AND picked up the Innovation in controls award somehow. Pretty mind boggling.
And to top off the week - We just had a half field roll of carpet dropped off today (Thank you Sessa’s) We can finally drive our robot more than 20 feet in one direction for a few days before heading to Houston. All in all, a pretty good week. I’d call it a Win.
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Arm that was not used at two FRC competitions seems to be working! Maybe we’ll get practice time before champs.
CNC Router arrived… but it’ll stay in boxes until school upgrades power.
Update:
Weekend Loss to undo weekly win?
Two things confirmed
- Motors had enough torque
- Don’t use MaxTube Light for more than two events with said high torque motors.
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MSC!
But something was wrong. There was no bad weather and no construction on I-75 coming up. Then I realized. It was really supposed to happen next week. Stand by for ice storms in about 5 or 6 days.
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Looking forward to seeing you folks again.
We had a great run in Ventura.
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Finally got my works first CNC running on the 58th anniversary of the company. Most of the people there hadn’t ever seen a CNC.
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We had a great meet-n-greet with an amazing rookie team (9092) from down the road a piece who finds themselves going to Champs. Especially cool that it was the wildcard we generated that punched their ticket to Houston. Expecting great things from them in the future.
And from the It’s a Small World Dept, even though the team is located 25 miles away, I found out that their lead mentor and I live just 3 blocks apart.
Also super psyched to see our friends at 5006 qualify at Green Country! Way to go!
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Currently visiting Saugatuck, Michigan with my girlfriend and her family. This place is absolutely beautiful!
I also learned how to ride a bike and now I’m obsessed with it. I rode a bike for a collective total of 3.5 hours over the past 3 days.
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One very sleepless weekend and a 36+ hr day later, I have survived all my events, albeit with a very croaky voice and large lack of sleep from DCMP. Even though just about everything that could hit the fan did hit the fan, thanks to some parts lent by other teams and resilience of the entire team, the robot got back in fighting form after a long Friday just in time for eliminations and making a kick ass run on the 7th alliance. This season makes me sad I’m graduating because of the amazing students and mentor base I got to know and work with the last three months but I guess that means I’ll just have to come back to Indiana sooner than even I expected.
I’ll end the post off with Kirby pre-chaos of this weekend I took at Greenwood last week that I jokingly named POV Your a Cone in the team drive that caused a good laugh.
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1967 made the Playoffs at our home event for the first time in ten years, and the second time in team history. We’re happy to be on this upwards trend!
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Regional FIRST Impact Award for only the second time in team history!
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Our robot functioned as designed at the Tulsa Green Country regional. This was a massive improvement over Heartland where we had multiple mechanical issues.
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sorry for the long post but I had a lot to cover
For 17 years, our team had no blue banners to our name, now, after winning WPI District, Wilson Division, and NE Championship all in the span of 7 days we have 3 blue banners. We were not the most powerful bot in New England, we didn’t have the best Auto, we didn’t cycle the most game pieces, but we kept our heads down and did our job calmly and reliably, which let us go 11-1 in qualifications at Wilson field, it gave us the opportunity to pick the most offensively powerful bot as our alliance partner (huge shout out to frc176 Aces High). Together we picked a strong third alliance member #frc1699 an extremely reliable auto-balancing robot that averaged 6-8 game pieces per round (I don’t know why the other 7 alliance captains overlooked 1699 they were a diamond in the rough). We powered through the Wilson playoffs, taking down some very impressive alliances along the way.
After winning Wilson Field, we went into the grand finals. Thats when all hope seemed lost, during the practice match before NECMP Finals One the 2x1 Rev Extrusion for our drive frame failed, the rivets ripping out, this allowed our superstructure frame to twist and let the Axel for our shoulder joint slide out. our arm was DOA. Thanks to the extremely understanding NE Event staff they gave us the time we needed to make repairs and get our bot back on the field for finals 1. Durring the chaos the NE Event Staff were handing out awards for Wilson and Mier Divisions. things were so hectic in our pit behind the field curtian I didnt find out until 2 hours later that we had one the award for Engineering Excelence. We got the bot on the field for Finals 1 , won the match, we get the robot of the field only to realize that the strap that holds the battery in place had completely ripped in two, so another frantic repair session and we are back on the field for Finals 2.
Finals 2 is looking good, our alliance pulls of a 5 game piece, engage and triple mobility autonomous just as we planed. Then disaster, on our second run to the double substation, our Robot goes dead sticks, lost comms. 30 seconds later its back up and we try everything to still claw out the victory however its not enough and we fall to the blue alliance. Now for our third frantic repair session in just as many matches, with the help Multiple CSAs we check every single network connection in our bot and reinforce them, in addition we review our log files both from the DS as well as using AdvantageScope (another huge shout out to frc6328 for writing such a useful program). We finally track the issue to a brown out on the RoboRIO, turns out during an earlier code modification we had disabled current limiting on our Arm and when the Arm crashed into the double substation the increased load on the motors browned out the system. with that issue fixed and the current limiting reenabled we were back on the field for a final tie breaker to decide the New England Championship.
We pushed it to the limit in an all out battle to fill the entire grid, however we came up just short of the perfect score, 1757 and 176 started the climb with only seconds to spare and it wasn’t enough, we had 3 robots docked, and the blue alliance had 3 robots docked and engaged, the final buzzer rang and the blue alliance erupted in cheers on the assumption that they had just won, thinking the same thing I began a solemn walk onto the field to take the robot off, as I got to the gate to enter the field the Final Results went up on the board, I looked up to see the HAAS Formula one car streaking away leaving a “RED ALLIANCE WINS” Banner in its place, after that my memory gets kinda fuzzy there was a lot of hugging I remember that.
Video of our reaction to the win, (Im the one sprinting across the field like a linebacker to tackle my drive team)
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Quite a bunch of wins this week.
- 8576’s robot Gold Rush experienced a breakdown during during the last Qualifiaction match on the mercury Field at the FiT District Championship. The win was that it was the first breakdown of the whole season and it was minor meaning the team had achieved one of their goals, building a reliable robot.
- We ended up ranking 15th, far higher than we expected for a helper-bot. Most likely, this was due to hitting another one of our goals, totally consistent performance that is above average at all events. It is likely that we were the highest ranked robot using the KOP chassis proving tank (and simplicity) are not dead.
- After a nail-biting alliance selection session, we were ultimately selected by 118 Robonauts and their partner 3005 RoboChargers. It was amazing to see how quickly they came to help us repair our robot, offering advice and parts.
- Working together on the practice field showed that the three teams were able to work togher seamlessly, ultimately leading to winning the Division Championship after hard fought matches with some very worthy opponents, including the 3 Alliance lead by 2687 Team Apprentice who we played 3 times in succession.
- Advancing to the District Championship round, we met with the Apollo Division winning alliance lead by 6672 Fusion Corps. After another two intense matches, our alliance emerged victorious.
- The robot experience two more minor breakdowns during the Division playoff matches and during the two District Championsip matches. In all instances, the drive team was able to switch gears to continue scoring though at a slower pace. I consider this a win becuase I could sense that the team members were getting a bit cocky due to the extreme reliability that had up to that point. In reality, many of their mechanisms and design elements were hastily thown together and could have been implemented in better and more robust ways. Hopefully, they will now be more open to listening to suggestions for how to further improve their design. If they did not have these breakdowns, it is likely they continue to think what they did was the best way.
- The team members now have the challenge of making repairs quickly in preparation for FIRST Championship.
We could not have achieved such good results without the assistance from so many people and teams that were so generous with their assistance.
- Karthik Kanagasabapathy for presenting the “Effective FIRST Strategies” videos that we studied and implemented the concepts presented in them.
- Allen Gregory and the other mentors and team members of 3847 Spectrum and the mentors and team members of 624 Cryptonite who evaluated our proposed robot concepts at the end of Week 2. Their invlauable advice gave us the confidence to forge ahead with the implementation with our ideas.
- Our alliance mates at the Channelview and Houston events, 8177 Vector, 8370 Glow With the Flow (2X) and 8594 J.E.H.S. Cyberjags. Their superb performance were a big part of our success.
- We are grateful ur alliance partners on the Mercury field, 118 Robonauts and 3005 RoboChargers believed in the team with what looked like “a wooden fruit crate on a KOP chassis”, giving us a chance and sticking with us even with our inopportune breakdowns instead of calling a backup.
- We are also very gratefull for the efforts that 624 Cryptonite made years ago to to get the STEM Center built. Having this facility available to us for extensive driver practice and testing was a huge part of our success.
- Last but not least, we owe so much of our success to the support from our school, Jordan High School, Ms Harris our sponsor and the parents of the students.
On a personal note, I found a great taco stand several miles north of the GRB that is open late. The second time I went (Friday night), it was so busy they had someone from a security company directing traffic in and out of their parking lot.
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