Competition Week 7

Six years of being at the furthest field from the pits...

Six years, six visits to the World Championship. (Or... World Championship South for the past few years...) Last year we raised the bar for ourselves. We had a high target to reach for, and not much time to finish any last minute planning, practice, or upgrades. But once again, we were going to Houston.

Tacoma Aftermath

Quite literally, as soon as we returned home from Tacoma and the District Championship, Slack buzzed my attention. In one of our engineering channels, our maniac coach revealed his true insanity: after chats, conversations, deliberations, and more, we were going to drop 9 pounds (from our current 124.5), fabricate and mount a level 3 climber, and not lose any of our current scoring or pushing capability. Utter madman. We had our restful Sunday, and Monday we got to work.

Ok, here's the plan:

* Remove our 3 mini-CIM gearbox
* Swap in a 2-NEO drivetrain (and install Spark, software tune, <try> to come up with some autonomous pathing based on what people have posted online)
* Install mounts and plumbing for 4-20" pistons
* Design and fabricate a mini-drive to be deployed by the rear 2 pistons

Sounds simple, right? Oh, and we had the requirement of finishing this work in record time to minimize practice bot downtime, and allow for the most  practice and tuning time.

The Road (Airspace) to Houston

We started by swapping out the CIM motors for NEOs. They were a direct plug-and-play with the gearbox, and 2 NEO's per side afforded us over 7 pounds of weight. The critical elements involved software tuning, and our driver getting a feel for how the new motors reacted and behaved. While the robot was getting run through its paces, our design team was at work once more with new piston mounts, 20" stroke pistons, and a micro-gearbox and drive motor which would allow us a HAB 3 climb. Our motivation for the climb was to control our ranking destiny at Worlds. We had a robot capable of high level play, but without the "easy" RP, we would be more at the mercy of the scheduling randomizer.

One of our mentors, ready for Houston

The verdict was made sooner than later however. Our driver felt too big a difference in the responsiveness and acceleration. Don't mess with the mojo. It was too late in the season, he was too used to the miniCIM motors. We swapped back to the original spec, and eeked our our final hours of drive practice. (HAB 2 start, 15 game pieces scored, and a HAB 1 finish. Good practice.) In terms of the development race I think we went... sideways. Some teams may have packed new upgrades that brought benefit. We had the benefit of a known package that did work well.

We love our PNW family. Teams were preparing for a special surprise on the Einstein field, but there's also some amazing teams that band together to help each other with the more laborious tasks. The Saturday before competition, we packed up our pit rollers and brought them down to the FIRST Washington field-house where 2557 and 360 had organized a full-sized trailer to haul gear for local teams. We had a short morning, but it was nice to see the mentors and students on different teams all pitching in to unload and load trucks and vans together.

World Championship Houston

Apex graciously gifted us a pineapple! (After we may... or may not... have "borrowed" their dog...)

Our travel crew is organized in 2 groups: the Monday Group, and the Wednesday Group. The Monday group left on.. well... Monday (shocking!) and was comprised of our drive team and pit team, with supplies to open the crate and pull the robot out. The idea is that they arrive early, and are capable of setting up and running the weekend should any delays or issues happen with the Wednesday group. Fun story time: The Monday group brought a drill and the bits required to un-crate the robot. First task was inspection, and.... they didn't have the tools to pull the bumpers off, nor did they have a battery, or anything outside of the one drill. (Our tool-chest showed up a few hours later, but overall it was pretty entertaining to hear about. Thanks volunteer inspectors for carrying around some tools!)

Wednesday myself and the rest of the crew flew down to Houston. By this point, the pit was set, the robot was inspected, and we were looking into one final option for making our level 2 climb more gentle and repeatable, and less... yeet. (For the people around my age reading who don't know 'yeet', it means 'full Leroy Jenkins'.) ((For those people older than me that don't know either yeet, nor Leroy Jenkins, they mean 'go all Dukes of Hazzard'.)) (((If you don't know any of those 3... then I really can't explain it.)))  We added another set of pistons to gently lift the front of the bot, complementing the existing pistons on the rear of the bot. The pistons were <barely> too weak to lift. So we moved them forward. This changed the lift geometry such that we couldn't lift the front wheels high enough. Once more we tried, but in the end, we removed the pistons and simply had to send it.

Our swiss cheese chassis. We tried to hide the holes under the air tanks...

An amusing situation came from all this - we drilled 36 holes on each side of the chassis to give us the weight allowance for the pistons. We ended up weighing in right at 125.0 pounds. (After weighing in at 125.1, then 125.2) We were so nervous of going over the weight limit, that we instantiated a new rule: no more stickers on the robot. Yep, we were that afraid of going over weight, we didn't let anyone add any more stickers. That, is CyberKnight tolerance.

Our 10 matches played out... sorta as we expected? Most matches had climbers. The game play had indeed come to us, so we were rockin'. In Carver match 9, we were the first team to fill a rocket, and simultaneously the first team to solo fill a rocket on the field. Match 48 we were the second alliance on Carver to do the double rocket, working nicely with 3309. (Thank you!) Our only loss came at the hands of 1678 and 330. (How's that for a random match pairing? I would have loved to be that alliance's third bot!) Over the course of our matches, we had one reliability oddity. Our elevator, for some reason, decided it didn't want to use any of the preset heights. Fortunately our operator was able to manually run to the necessary heights and we continued scoring (albeit slowly), but the scariest part of the issue came after the match. We brought the robot back to the pits, and everything... worked. We didn't touch or change anything, and we still don't know 100% what actually happened. (Gremlins. Or bunnies. Definitely bunnies.) With that moment of unease over, we ended the qualification matches in rank 2 with 32 ranking points. (Last year we ranked twice as high... clearly we need to do better next year...)

The dream team - 4911, 118, 2147, and 5006 getting ready for eliminations.

We picked Robonauts as our first pick. (Man, that just sounds awesome to say. I'm gonna say it again.) We, the pokey 6-year young team from Seattle, picked 118, the 22-year old Robonauts. They were great to work with. Had different ideas on strategy, communication, and were awesome in answering all of my silly questions about their robot. To round out our alliance we selected some good hometown friends in 2147, and our partners from last years Carver-winning alliance 5006. Both were strong defensive bots that were also capable scorers. All-in all, a solid alliance. We played great together, had a strong showing in both quarter-finals and semi-finals, but we couldn't match the firepower of the 3rd place alliance. So, we didn't get the Einstein double, which was rather upsetting. However, at the same time, we learned a lot, grew a lot, and given where and how we started the season, I'm totally fine finishing as the second place captain, getting to semi-finals.

Watching the Einstein matches was a lot of fun. The PNW family came together once again, with teams bringing pins, buttons, bows and etc, to green out Einstein. I love the PNW family. (Even before Einstein, PNW teams went from field to field cheering on any teams still in contention!) Our district will only grow stronger with the help and support we provide each other.

Einstein round robin.