What was your 2018 Greatest Success?

FIRST General Forum
#63

Building off Ed’s response, my personal greatest success is that I won the Dean’s List Award at Detroit Champs and managed to convince my team and my family that I didn’t until the final ceremony.

Honestly, I think my team’s, 4384, greatest success was managing to bounce back from a very difficult season. In the previous year we endured a great deal of difficulty, losing our head and founding mentor as well as relocating our shop, resulting in failing to qualify for the state championship (although winning a blue banner as a backup bot). However this year, the team made large strides toward sustainability and managed to qualify for the World Champs. We even managed to win EI as well as several other business related awards including Entrepreneurship at the State Champs despite this being the first year for our business team. It was an overall great experience and we even managed to train our freshman and sophomores very well.

Hopefully we can build on this success this upcoming season.

#64

Thank you so much! We worked many long hours of work and outreach to finally hit that goal. None of us were expecting it and we were so excited to finally reach that goal. Congratulations on your great season as well! Always very impressive to see a team like yours go so far and do that well!

#65

My personal biggest success in 2018 was working with a low resource team in week one as an event volunteer to help them place a cube on the scale by week five.

Last year, in week one, I volunteered at the PCH Gainesville Event. I volunteered at Pit Admin, so as the event came to a close, I began to walk the pits watching teams pack up and begin staging to leave. In the hustle to leave that most teams were in, I saw a group of 4 students and a mentor sitting in a mostly bearen pit staring at their robot that had been preforming lackluster throughout the competition. I walked over to find students upset, and a mentor who felt like he had failed the kids. The robot’s giant arm was under-geared, resulting in it being unusable. I came over, worked with the kids, told them their problem, and worked with them to find possible solutions. Fast forward to week five - they are at their second event. The team shows up with a redone arm, and manages to place a cube in the scale on the practice field. They were all overjoyed, and were so happy that they could reliably compete and have fun. The team never made it to DCMP, but the students are absolutely stoked for next season now.

Side note: This is why I volunteer for FRC.

Also, at PCH Columbus, the PCH team was able to setup the entire event in under 5 hours. That was pretty awesome.

#66

We had a great bounceback season after our many failures in Steamworks. To recap, imagine not being able to do the gear in Steamworks or not even trying. My team, much to my protest, decided to purely focus on a shooting robot that year. We did have a gear catcher but it never got on the robot as the ball storage grew and grew in size; then once we got to the competition- our shooting wasn’t effective and was failing. No backup system, no 2nd option. We were a big heavy robot yet on mecanum wheels. So yeah, that was a disappointing season but in PowerUp we made up for that. We had a successful cube intake and lifter. We made it the farthest our team has ever gotten by being picked by the 5th alliance. While we lost, we were happy we made it that far

#67

2771’s Greatest successes this year would probably winning our 5th district Chairmans award, and becoming finalists at 3 events. At our first MI event we were finalists against Stryke Force, at our second MI event we were finalists against Comets and then at the district championship we were finalists against the Michigan state champions, 4003.

#68

I was hoping to pair up with you guys at Forest Hills, but our high rank fell after a few bad matches. Congratulations on your success this year (especially at IRI, captaining an alliance to the Semi’s at IRI is a great accomplishment).

#69

SOBOTZ’s greatest success for the season was 100% winning Rookie All-Star for Tesla-Carson. We also grew our team from ~30 people at the end of 2017 to almost 100 members right now.

#70

Whoa, that’s amazing as a rookie team. We’re running a large team now, and if you’re looking for any insights on managing a team that size, let us know.

#71

It was fun seeing your win at CVR. I traded for 2 shirts for my in-laws in LA after seeing your accomplishments! Being able to ally with a team that you graciously hosted during the year was great!

#72

1678’s greatest accomplishment for winning an award this year was winning Chairman’s for the first time at Sacramento (and discovering avocados are a citrus fruit…) We followed up at CVR to win our first Entrepreneurship. Our greatest overall accomplishment was expanding our youth robotics program and engaging the wider community in our county.

#73

I can more than relate. We made the same mistake for Steamworks even though I very clearly remember the team agreeing that gears were the first priority during initial planning.

Happy that you guys were able to bounce back though!

#74

Building our first cascaded elevator (and having it work)

#75

For 291 it was definitely making it to champs, ranking 8th, then showing off our new 3 cube auto! :smiley:

#76

I feel 5190’s greatest success was nailing our 3 cube scale autonomous. Our programmers literally devoted all their time and finally got it to work.
#Ramsyeet

#77

Building the robot in 2 weeks.

Team 6860 originally did not have a decent place to work. We were given a small room in our school, but we were not allowed cut metal or do anything. We had to beg the school to let us use the drill. Also we only had about 2 hrs a day to build the robot, which was not enough for a team who did not know the difference between a between the different types of wrenches. But thanks to team 3314 the Mechanical Mustangs we were able to build a decent functioning robot and even qualify and go to worlds.

#78

For 6334, our greatest 2018 success was The Hampton Roads District Event. At this event, we were coming in with a newly tuned switch bot after our elevator broke in our first event. The day before the event, we got a 2 cube autonomous from any position operational, and then did honestly the best we have ever done. We had placed 2nd, extremely close to being 1st, and went on to the finals, only to lose to the 4th seed due to penalties. We then won, much to our surprise, the Safety Award and the Innovation in Control Award.

Overall, this event showed us that as long as you keep pushing forward, you can succeed and make greatness happen.

#79

These aren’t as crazy as some of the other team’s but I’d say personally, seeing our auto work at all (we’ve been in programming dark ages for a decade) and winning team spirit was an incredible moment at the New York City Regional for 395. It was a really demoralizing build season because of a lot of interpersonal conflict, and it was really special to watch all of us come together and still have fun at the event anyway.

P.S. 20th year and big things are happening :slight_smile:

#80

5826 had a bit of an off year. Fun robot, fun team but we had to scale back to one tournament status.

I’d say our biggest success was something buried deep inside the robot. We had a rather heavy elevator system that tended to drift down when the winch was powered off. Needing an airbrake we had a first year member take on the task. He drew it in CAD, machined the parts, assembled and installed it.

This was a mini Cim motor with everything but the rotor stripped out. It had a small pneumatic cylinder to “stop” the rotor with the whole thing engaged with the two motor gearbox that powered our winch. Software was able to toggle this so the brake was always on when the winch was off and vice versa.

Now this thing looked so darned illegal. The first inspector who looked at it scratched his head and called a second. Eventually we had 8 guys in yellow hats gathered around the robot admiring it.

I personally feel we deserved an award of some sort but creative use of stuff on hand does not always get the recognition it warrants. But a photo of the student designer posing with smiling guys in yellow hats…I call that our 18 highlight.

T.Wolter

#81

My team’s greatest success was when we had a drive-train pulley snap right before a match. There was a perfect storm of removing the outside flange of the robot and replacing the broken part. All of this was done before the next match. What made this extra special was that most of the students involved in this process were not seniors and will be coming back next year. It was at that moment when I realized they were going to do just fine next year! That’s what the sport is about, passing the baton to the next in line. 1319 had a large amount of students in the 2018 class so the greatest success was passing on our knowledge.

Also it was nice to win the safety award one last time.

#82

This didn’t happen during the season, but… My team has been working on building a t-shirt robot to use at football/basketball games for almost 2 years. This year we finally got to use it in our schools homecoming parade and it was a big hit. Otherwise most of our season was a flop.