Competition Week 6

We had nice weather out here! For one day... Then it rained...

Rank 8 in PNW in terms of District Points. Yep, that seems right. Pretty happy with that. Prior to District Championships in Tacoma, we calculated the minimum district points needed would be around 125-130, and felt confident we could rank in the top 15, get picked up by a solid alliance, and be recognized with an award for either our robot or business model. In actuality, the  district points cutoff required for World's qualification was 142. Not to worry, we ranked slightly higher than 15th.

Tacoma was another great weekend of robots, friends, mistakes, and achievements. Our 4th consecutive weekend of competition (and coffee), and the outcomes qualifies us for World Championships in another week's time (in which we'll also have coffee).

District Championships

I love getting the corner pit.

Day 1

Day 0 and 1 of Tacoma was fun. Inspection passed like a breeze, added more items to help with our level 2 climb assist (leeerrroooyyyy) and actually left the venue a little early before close. The robot was up and running, we got in a ton of practice time and matches, and software tether sessions, and all the boring stuff that we do to be competitive, and check off all the boxes for preparation. But anywho, we got to see all our friends from Oregon and all around Washington. I personally got to see some alumni returning, and even a friend who lives out in Maryland (and works for a NASA contractor! Go FIRST!) The morning was pretty low-key, I explored the venue (no mentor lounge? boo!) and had a lovely lunch. When we got back to the pits... we were stunned by what had transpired....

We got orange'd.

By Spartronics.

The orange in question.

Not to worry, we added our own logo and passed it on to Apex. (Who then passed it to Jack in the Bot. Who then passed it to Spartabots. Don't know what happened after that!) For Spartronics, we handed them a special gift. We, uh, didn't have a banana, so we drew a banana on a yellow sticky note and gave it to them. We love Spartronics. <3

It took them a few minutes to notice the orange.

The afternoon then led to our first three matches. PNW is a very competitive district. We have some incredible scoring machines, and some robust and wall-like defenders. For us, the stat that mattered was the number of climbers. Of our 12 matches, 10 had reliable level 3 HAB climbers; the RP would flow. Thursday we played 3 matches: 3 of them we scored HAB points, 2 of them we filled rockets, and 1 of them we scored 11 game elements in the rocket. One cargo short of a perfect start to the District Champs. This effort put us up in the number 1 ranking position. Where we stayed. For the whole next day.

Day 2

Day 2 is the usual long day, matches all day long, too much time between the matches when everything is fine, not enough time between the matches when everything goes to pot, and lots of really loud music. I stayed in the pits, I stand by my decision. Day two we had 6 matches, several good fun matches, several, difficult ones, and yet we seemed to come out on top every time. More of these matches came super close to filling rockets, but our fame became our downfall as defenders looked to show their strengths by shutting us down. We held the top rank for the entire day, holding back the tide of Bear Metal, Jack in the Bot, Hotwire, and Shockwave. (Good company!)

Our driver getting off his feet for a few minutes.

The night of day two we went through our scouting pick-lists. The hotel didn't have a room big enough, and we were kicked out of the large corner due to another event running at the same time, so our core group of 7 students and mentors banged out the list in record time. (Fewer people = faster results. Fewer people to listen and learn though...) The field at Tacoma was deep. There were so many good teams in low positions, both scoring robots, defensive robots, break-out teams, and historic teams. District Champs is a weird place. We've had a great robot and a poor ranking to show for it. (We've had an ok robot with no climber that rocked it!) But yeah, teams all over the place, and we had to decipher our mountain of data to determine solid first picks, and order them, then create a list of more than 20 robots for a second list, and order them. A tall task, but our list came out looking good, with data to back the choices.

Our lead scout, pouring over the data. Our assistant scout made me some delicious tea.

Day 3

In the morning we had our final 2 matches, finishing off the event with some of our hardest matches yet. We were given a few gifts that morning. Our first match, the opposing defender knocked our rocket, and gave us a free RP. Bear Metal and Jack in the Bot had some extremely robust defense played on them, preventing their alliance from earning a 4th RP. And in our final match, the opposing alliance opted not to play defense against us, allowing us to earn 4 RP to close out the qualifying rounds. Nothing much we could control other than finishing our rocket in the final match, so, they were all gifts, and they allowed us to hold the rank 2 position at the end of qualifications. Sundome, 3 short weeks ago, we had a brick, and here at District Championships, we were the second alliance captain. I'm happy with our development and improvement over the season. :-)

Very important to remove before flight.

We put together a solid looking alliance. Our first pick was 2990, a low-bot with super consistency aided by their camera and a reliable HAB 3 climber. For our second pick we were able to pull 948 NRG from deep in the field. Just that morning, NRG defended Jack in and Bot and Bear Metal, preventing them from scoring a rocket. On paper, we had a shot to win. On carpet, well, that part is a bit trickier.

We went, eh, a little sticker crazy

During lunch, I took a stroll over to both Hotwire and NRG's pits, checking out their robots up close, watching their preparation steps and asking questions about their mechanisms and reliability. Both teams were good to go, and we stepped into the quarter-finals. Two matches against the formidable 7th alliance, captained by RAID, pulling last years World Champion Spartabots and the solid red-and-black (nice colors!) Robototes. (Fun fact - I drive/bike directly past the Robototes school heading to and from work every day. I give a little wave sometimes, but I think they are all inside building robots so, they don't see me.) Two tough matches saw victory come our way. Our alliance performed well, being slightly behind after the sandstorm period, but managed to outpace the scoring on the opposite end of the field by the final buzzer. We were headed into the semi-finals. We would be taking on the number 3 alliance, captained by our alliance partner from 2018, Shockwave, and their 2019 partners Sonic Squirrels, and Chaos Theory. Following our quarter-finals win, I popped into NRG's pit again to see if they needed any help. They had taken a severe blow to one of their climbing pistons and would be unable to use it. As they were our primary defender, they taped and strapped the arms back, with no chance for them to extend outside the frame perimeter.

During this time, we actually had a real mechanical issue of our own! To help aid our quarter and semi-final efforts, we created a new button that would use a software preset speed to drive down from HAB level 2 at the start of the match. We build tough robots, but it takes just one part to cause a failure. In our case, we managed to crack one of our plastic wheel hubs from one of our center traction wheels. Impressive, if I do say so myself. Fortunately, we still use our 2016 patented (not really) split bearing captures, so swapping out the wheel took less time than typing up this sentence.

Pretty sure that's not supposed to happen...

The semi-finals were tough. Match 1 we were in points even after the sandstorm period, but Chaos Theory was an absolute brute, and blocked our scoring at every opportunity. On the far side of the field, our own brute had been caught and stuck in the depot. The post-match inspection showed the root cause of their issue: the spur gears in their drivetrain had fractured, and in the one side, sheered completely. Completely. It was pretty much a cylinder.  Almost smooth on the outside. Well. That's not good. With time running down, we used up our timeout and collected up the NerdHerd, the first team on the backup robot list. (There were a lot of good robots on this list too.) We scrambled to find our scouting data once more, and re-look at the alliance game plan. NerdHerd was a scoring robot. We had played solid defense in past matches. Our driver was looking to have some fun. Sounded like a good plan.

Well, many folks have said things about plans and reality, and in this case, we ran the plan, our driver had his fun, but we sadly lost our second match, and were out of the tournament. (We then told our good friends Jack and Bear to go beat 'em up. They did.) The robots job was done for the weekend. We ran through our post-match one last time, and started packing up our pit. The award ceremony closed out our District Championship event. We were not in the running for Chairman's, Engineering Inspiration, or Highest Rookie Seed. (Very sad to not win Highest Rookie Seed this year... We haven't won it since 2014...) We did have a solid robot, and a solid business plan and felt that we would get recognized for one of our team or robot aspects. All our gifts were handed out in the morning though, and the judges recognized a number of other incredible teams and machines. Unlike 2017 however, when we also took home no awards, we were upbeat. We had a great showing, and qualified for Houston.

Pit torn down, packed up, and ready to roll

The next morning, a Slack post was sent out, describing a completely insane idea for modifying several parts of the bot to better control our destiny at Houston. Our head coach is still a maniac, and I'm starting to like this robot.

Also, this happened... To me...
Maybe I should try the bald look...
It seems to work for other FRC mentors...

Quote of the Week:

"There's not enough flower petals in the world that could make him look that pretty." - One loving, caring, mentor about another. (This time, it wasn't me. Or about me. No, really.)