We have pictures of the look of horror on the ref’s face as you drove under us. That’s my favorite moment for the year.
I joined 3512 at it’s lowest point in years. We really struggled through 2016, and 2017 was a lot better but we still held potential for more. 2018 was the culmination of the efforts of so many people as we finally got our first regional win since 2012 (RIP 1717). To finally get a second winners banner after so long was incredible for us all, and then this last weekend at Chezy Champs we received the Most Improved Team award. To win the award really shows how all our hard work has paid off in this season, and we how we are a different team compared to 2016.
We really can’t do this without thanking Adam Heard, as when he came and spoke to our team before build season it changed something in all of us that really made a difference in how we worked.
Our greatest success came from our failures. This season was a disaster for our team due to the leadership mentors (myself included) not knowing the limits of what we could reasonably accomplish on our own. We had an idea of what we honestly thought was reasonable for us to do, and it took a failed season to get a better understanding of where we’re at as a team and what we need to work on to get to where we want to be. JVN is right, life is iterative. We’re working hard now to make sure our next iteration is better.
Smh what about beating 1st seed as 8 with us? 
Echoing some of the sentiments in this thread, we saw a lot of improvements this year, both compared to prior seasons and over the course of the 2018 season.
Without a doubt, the robot that we built was the best robot we’ve built since I joined in 2016. Likely the best one we’ve ever built from an ambition and reliability point of view.
We attended two events for the first time, which was a huge boon. After an awful showing at our first regional, we were able to make refinements to our intake design, something we never would have been able to do before. At our second regional, we played very consistently and had no major issues. I was already happy that we were “bored” most of the time in the pits, since it really seemed like nothing ever broke. That in and of itself was a success. We have always struggled with reliability issues.
However, it continued when we got picked last overall. Largely, I suspect, due to our insanely overbuilt climber that we were able to use alongside 3130 (#1 seed) during a quals match, securing 4RP. We continued to double climb with 3130 through elims in addition to playing the opponent switch. 3130-2175-3082 reached the finals undefeated. It was our first time in the finals ever. Though we lost to a strong #2 1625-2451-2225 alliance in the finals, we secured a wild card, and our first champs berth.
We didn’t do amazingly at champs, but we had a ton of fun. Definitely one of the inspirational experiences I’ve ever had. Qualifying also got us a lot of recognition at school, from students, teachers, and administrators alike. The North Star finalists alliance got redemption at the EMCC off-season competition, which constituted our first event win.
For a team that hadn’t achieved much for the first 9 years of it’s existence, I think we made our 10th a year to remember. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!
I wonder who? 
Congrats!
We took twice as many students to regionals.
We won an engineering award.
We learned a lot. ::rtm::
(On a down note) We ended regional season watching from the stands:(
But we were a break away from advancing at our first regional. 
We also made some great friends along the way between teammates and with other teams.
We get to do it all again with more students, more outreach, a new shop, and new regionals.:ahh:
2018 has been 3512’s best season by a large margin. This was the 3rd time in 4 years we’ve earned a spot to Champs. Our season unfolded as follows:
LA Regional (Week 3)
2nd Seed, 2nd Alliance Captain
Semifinalists
Judges Award
Ventura (Week 5)
2nd Seed, 2nd Alliance Captain
Regional Winners
Engineering Excellence
Houston Champs (Turing Division)
5th seed, 5th Alliance Captain
Semifinalists
Chezy Champs (Off-season)
6th seed, 5th alliance captain
Quarterfinalists
Most Improved Team Award
Out of all of that, for me personally, our greatest success was winning @ Ventura. This was our second win in team history, and our first win as an alliance captain (for reference, our first win was in 2012 as the 2nd pick of the #1 alliance). Winning as an alliance captain was incredible. The energy of our team at that event, and especially on Saturday as the playoff matches were happening was electrifying. We were loud and we were proud and we fought for that win with everything we had, succeeding despite not running autonomous throughout the playoffs due to encoder issues and we took it too a 3rd match in the finals before ultimately coming out on top.
Our success this season, in my opinion, can be explained by a few different things. I’ll echo what Derek said earlier in this thread by thanking Adam Heard from 973 for coming to us in the 2017 off-season. While I personally wasn’t involved in the 2017 season, and didn’t become involved again until after Adam had visited, the effects of his visit and his recommendations on my team were immediately obvious to me.
Related to that, we started the 2018 with a number of well-defined goals which we stuck to as best we could. These included maximizing COTS components where possible, minimizing welding (We were losing our long time lead mechanical mentor after 2018 who facilitated 95% of welding on our robot), and making a concentraded effort to design the entire robot in CAD.
Additionaly, in 2017 as I understand it, we went for a relatively safe design for our robot, we played to our strengths, and as a result ignored fuel entirely. We did ok in 2017, but for 2018 we set the bar high for ourselves, and right out of the gate decided we wanted to be able to do everything Power Up had to offer, including the multi robot hang. While we never were able to make our triple hang goal a reality, we did manage to get our double hang to be really consistent and I believe that made us more competitive in qualification because of the Face The Boss ranking points, and made up for other robots that were better at the scale than us.
Next, our practice robot allowed for untold hours of practice for the drivers, the software team, and the mechanical team (we pivoted from triple hang to double hang the day after bag up) had a chance to test our climbing forks before competition. Our 2018 practice robot was more identical to our practice robot than previous years, and overall we’ve gotten much better at the process of creating two robots.
Finally, I’d like to thank our Central Coast friends on 5818. They knocked us out at LA week 3, and that pushed us to come back better and stronger for Ventura. At Ventura, they were the best alliance partner we could hope for who’s strengths complimented our weaknesses: strong drive train, consistent autonomous, vertical reach on the scale, and most importantly they perfected the art of getting on to our back ramps for a reliable double hang. Every. Single. Match.
I hope that we can learn from our successes of 2018, as we continue to expand on our 2018 goals, and set new goals for 2019 and beyond. See you all for FIRST Deep Space!
Thanks for reading!
-Nick Kremer
My team managed to pull an upset at both the St. Louis regional as 6th seed, and the CIR as 5th seed. Sadly we did not advance passed the semifinals, but we made it to worlds off the waitlist! Overall, this year was pretty good for Icarus.
My personal favorite time/success is Qualification Match 74 from the CIR. I drove for 2081, and the match was 2481’s first and only defeat until worlds. It was great.
I’m adding one more of my own. I’ve loved reading these by the way.
Personally, I was given the honor of being a driver. My freshman year, I never would have imagined being on the field at all. Then in 2017, I was made pilot. I thought that was incredible (which it was), but where I would stop. Being able to drive the thing that I put so much effort in to, and also have my team standing behind me, thinking I was a good choice, was and always will be priceless.
We had three major victories for 2018, but 2018 was our worst year yet in terms of placing. One main reason for this: our third head mentor (coach) decided to quit towards the end of Week 3 and took all of the essential tools to completing the original design (yes they were his). So the team started Week 4 with one mission: start over completely and getting at least a somewhat working design built for competition. We did achieve this and that was our first victory. Our second victory was when the school board approved my dad as the new head coach, which is what the second head coach of the team wanted. Our third and final victory is that we are successfully rebuilding the team from the ground up. Several kids have asked when robotics is starting up again, we are finding more sponsors, and everything tis starting to stabilize. It is looking 2019 will be a year to remember. And I am very excited for my last year as a student.
319 had a great 2018 season.
Regarding our greatest success, we could look at our performance record…
Finalist at Central New York Regional (with 358 and 5254)
Winner at North Shore District Event (with 133 and 1289)
Winner at UNH District Event (with 1519 and 4555)
Winner at New England Championships (with 195 and 5846)
Semis in Tesla (with 238 and 340 and 5980)
Winner at BattleCry (with 195 and 9985)
Winner at Mayhem in Merrimack (with 131 and 885)
Rank 3rd at our first ever IRI
Or maybe we could look at Judged awards…
District Engineering Inspiration Award at North Shore
Industrial Design Award winner at UNH
Quality Award at NE Champs
But for me as a mentor, I would rather look at the continuous incremental improvement that our robot and team made throughout the season. Our Software team was never satisfied with the state of the robot and continued to improve on our auto routines. Our Drive team spent countless hours improving their skills on the field to the point of the robot being an extension of their own hands at the scale. Or maybe it was the look on Ty’s face when he came to the shop on Friday afternoon before NECMP and the team let him know that they wanted to build a pair of forks for our robot in the 2 days that we had before the event. Yes, we went to New England Championships with brand new forks for our buddy climb. That showed me that the Mechanical team was not going to settle with “good enough”.
But I think that the Greatest Success for me as a teacher, is the fact that 319 sent 100% of our graduating high school seniors off to college - again!
Winning Rookie All-Star at districts, and qualifying for Worlds in Detroit. We had no expectations and we are unbelievably excited for this upcoming year
In 2017 we placed #1 onTuring but endured a heartbreaking loss in the finals. In 2018 the students never stopped iterating, ended up getting picked unusually early on Turing (given our ranking), then won Turing and played on Einstein. Alas, our poor robot was beat up pretty bad in the Turing tournament and in no shape for the round robin on Einstein - didn’t win a match. We got to watch our friends up the road (148) win though!
So in 2019 …
2018 was a first season for 6996 Koalafied.
Greatest success was starting a new team and organising it to work well.
We had 2 students and one mentor (myself) with some previous FRC experience and we got a school based but community run team going.
We have raised money.
We have sourced parts.
Our software mentors and students had to do a lot of research to understand how to program FRC robots.
We have decided to build a scale robot.
With limited access to workshop (we could only work Saturdays and Sundays) we have managed to build a competition robot and practice robot.
We have been doing drive practice in the evenings on a private tennis court.
We went to our regional in Sydney aiming to be a “relaxed team” and place one cube on a scale.
In our best game we have placed 7 cubes on scale and ended up as a finalist.
Won RAS, qualified for Houston.
Went back to continue working on our practice robot.
In Houston we had a very consistent cube on the scale in Autonomous.
Finished 30th on Roebling and were the first pick of the 8th alliance.
Infected students, mentors and parents with the FRC bug.
Team 56 raised $14,000 in two weeks to get to the Detroit championship where we ranked 1st on the Darwin field and made it to the finals on our field.
If you don’t mind, how’d you manage that?
I made it into LTI to study CNC Machining.
4004’s biggest success was the season in a whole.
Jumping on deciding to do our first ever swerve drive, we got our code able to run the day of our first event, where we learned that we were having MANY issues with browning out our bot in Indiana. But that didn’t stop us, we banded together to find workable solutions, and rose the rest of the season to being either a captain for first pick for every event we went to, including our first time competing at Worlds.
With a great season, MARS is excited to launch this season, starting with running our own new FiM District Event!
You completely forgot about the Northern lights auto!
We wrote our own Pure Pursuit implementation that was mildly inspired by 254, allowing us to have a speedy cross field scale autonomous. It was incredibly exciting watching the auto run on the right side for the first time (on the Northern Lights Practice Field AND our school cafeteria, there is a big pillar blocking the right side).
Looking back 2018 was a very successful year for Team 230:
- Undefeated at our first event (week 2 - Waterbury);
- Earned our Double Engineering Award Quinfecta (ie. 2 of each of the 5 engineering awards) when we won the Engineering Excellence award in Waterbury;
- Won an engineering award at the NE DCMP - Innovation in Control Award;
- Had an amazing array of consistently performing autonomous routines to handle every permutation of scoring configurations - which had a significant impact on all the other items listed here;
- Rose 60 places in the rankings on Curie in one day! Started Friday ranked 66th place and ended in 6th place. :yikes:
So proud of what we accomplished.
Shout out to 4557! We were so happy when you won Chairman’s, you totally deserved it. Earning both DCA and EI in a single year is a major accomplishment.