So, Who Are the 4911 CyberKnights, V2

The 2019 FRC 4911 CyberKnights (Well, most of them...)

I've seen a lot of questions on the internet recently, and I really just want to help people, so I'll use this space to answer a pretty common question I see:

So, who are the 4911 CyberKnights?

V2, extended directors cut edition.

(With commentary)

This year, we faced difficulty alongside many other FRC teams across the globe. (And specifically the northern continental Americas.) Blizzards, dumpster fires, waiting for CAD to finish. Throwing CAD away, starting again, then waiting for CAD to finish... again.... Another blizzard... (and robo-plague! How could I forget about robo-plague!) This season had it all. Probably the most proud moment for me though came at the end of build season when I was able to open the lab refrigerator, and was able to continue breathing normally.

(This post was supposed to be amusingly long, but for realsies, there's actually some good stuff (like, Woodie Flowers' Good Stuff,) in here. I am so proud of the team, I just can't help but talk about them, and I do honestly try to make stories relate-able, and contain lessons that other students and mentors might find useful. So, here follows an in-depth recollection of build season, and closes off with a jumble of random thoughts and stories that for one reason or another caught my attention. I do hope you had a great season, and we all look forward to seeing you next time!)

The 2019 Story (An honest look at our build season)

The first weekend in January, we absorbed the new FRC game for 2019, Destination: Deep Space, sponsored by the Boeing Company. We read the rules, learned the points, looked for the cycles, point ceilings, potentials for strategic play and more. We calculated the maximum possible score, the estimated average scores for matches at a week 1 event, week 5, and the world championship. (We weren't that far off  if I remember correctly!) We identified a really cool scoring opportunity with buddy climbs. (Yep, we talked about it. We talked to Apex about it. We talked to Citrus Circuits about it. It still seems crazy.) At the end of the day, we identified the following robot priorities, in order:

• score cargo and hatches as fast as possible
• HAB level 3 climb
• solo fill a rocket (similar to priority 1, but requiring a lifting mechanism)

Further down, we wrote two other 'dreamland' robot.... requests?

• bring a buddy to HAB level 3
• HAB level 2 climb

That Sunday, we challenged our student leadership to set our robot priorities in concrete. For us, we had one experienced mechanical mentor for the first 4 weeks of build, so he would be a limiting resource. We would score both hatches and cargo (2 mechanisms), we wanted to climb level 3 (mechanism 3), and we wanted to solo a rocket (mechanism 4). We probably don't have the bandwidth to do everything (and in 6 years, we've never built an elevator...). So, the leadership team was not allowed to leave for the evening until they had decided: elevator for rocket, or climbing mechanism for HAB. At the end of the evening they had decided: we want to do it all! We would spend the first week prototyping and designing, ensuring that it was feasible to climb, and how easily we could build an elevator. (Heavily stealing from robots we'd seen last year. Very. Heavily. Like, copy-paste heavily. More on that later...)

Throughout this week, we spent a <ton> of time using CAD sketches for geometry, and whiteboard breakouts for concept and feasibility of different climbing ideas. This may be the part of the year where risk adversity got the worse of us, as we found several viable options, but when looking at the operational use, we became terrified of how unreliable they may be. "Another robot coming it to park <will> slam into those legs and break them." was a (realistic) argument made. Other arguments made were "No Darts. Just. No.", "Scissor lift will be way too heavy and way too slow." (For this one, we brought out one of our Einstein competitive FTC robots with a 14' scissor lift. It worked for the purpose of that game...) The final decision also relied on the super-structure of what we would need above the deck. At the time we were still thinking the elevator carriage would have a linear slide to adjust for scoring under defense. If a 20" climbing rig took up that space, we nixed the idea.

Our build space. Clean. Ish.

In the end, we did what we had done last year - looked through the robot-in-3-days concepts (they make great conceptual prototypes!) to see if we could steal an idea from them. Indeed! Snow Problem had a pneumatic clamp that would allow the bot to flip onto the platform, then release, qualifying for a HAB 3 climb. It was fast, simple, required space on only one side of the robot, and we could increase the arm-span to provide a large margin or error when lining up to climb. The downsides would be figuring out a deployment mechanism, and packaging the elevator and robot CG to enable us to sit upended on the platform. I personally was looking forward to the clever (well, dad-joke clever) post-it notes I could put on the bottom of our chassis.

So we moved forward with out base constraints - a 3-stage elevator with a height cap, clamp-and-flip climber, ground cargo intake, and a carriage on the elevator with a cargo shooter, hatch holder, and sideways tolerance adjuster. We can totally make this work. Totally. (Ehm, well, obviously... we didn't.)

Stealing pneumatics to test the feasibility of clamping with enough force to hold the robot while it flipped.

First up - the elevator. We opened up the CAD shared by 2910 in 2018, selected their elevator assembly, and copied it into a new folder called "definitely the CyberKnights elevator". (Thanks Jack!) First thing we noticed was that it was too tall, and in shortened version, would not reach the necessary height. So we tweaked it a little bit. And then basically started over from scratch, having not used anything at all from it. (Thanks anyway Jack!)

Second was the linear adjustment of the elevator carriage. This would be a simple mechanism that could slide +/- ~7 inches based on line follower sensors that we would mount on the base of the robot to track the white tape. Simply put, we didn't have the student/mentor support needed to pull it off. So, we pulled it off, and moved on to other things.

Oh wait! Zero! (Thank goodness for 0-indexing!) Zero actually came... first? The chassis! As I've mentioned time and again, we can spin up a chassis from empty Solidworks page to rolling physical item in 3 days flat. So naturally, this year we didn't get our chassis until day 22. We had a number of machining and assembly issues that caused a few days of this delay, however the real delay came from our strategy team. (Who's even on the strategy team. Oh... wait...) On day 7 our strategy team (in hindsight, I believe correctly) made the assessment that we would need to start on, and climb up to HAB level 2 to be competitive at World Championship level play. So, our chassis team ran away. (Literally. They all ran outside and hid from the rest of the team for the next 6 hours.) They came up with the 8-wheel design, and added 1/8" bulkheads to bear the impulse forces. (The 1/8" sheets did not like bending though...)

That's... not supposed to be cracked

Remember that one Thursday in week 1 when we came up with a brilliant new idea? It was pretty lit. (Hello, fellow young people!) It would be... (wait for it...) a short elevator with a pivoting arm and wrist. Yep, instead of making one lifting mechanism, this concept had us building 2. To be fair, the geometry looked solid, it packaged well for climbing, and could pick up directly from the ground (through a cutout in the chassis... ugh...). It also beat out another idea we had called MEGA-ARM!!! This idea was just... well, one big arm. (It worked in 2018!) In the end, these were just concepts that had validity, so we kept moving on with our existing ideas. Chassis, 3-stage elevator, clamp-and-flip climber. Something to score hatches and cargo. We totally got this.

So, we know how/where we are picking up hatches right? Can that mechanism pick up from the floor? (Do we need to?) I think JVN's priority list came out around this time. We were also vetting our ideas with 5803 Apex Robotics. (Thank you for the pineapple/mango!) Well, we had our hatch collector. It used hook-and-loop to pick up hatches, and pistons to deploy them. We again got into a number of.... debates.... about how effective the hook-and-loop would be, and how long it would last, both on the game pieces, and the robot mechanism. Finally, we did what we had become so used to doing with concepts this year - we scrapped it and started over.

We used our 2018 Einstein Finalist robot to prototype a hook-and-loop collector.

This was when our prototyping team really kicked into high gear. We built a wood mock-up of our intake, defining the angles and distances between the rollers and shooter wheels such that we would maintain contact with the cargo ball from the ground to the stored position. The team built up a new hatch mechanism starting with a seat motor of all things, and some FTC material. Our climber team built a wood mock-up of the clamping unit to test pistons and the gripping force and material to support 150+ lbs (with a safety margin). The elevator and chassis teams had finished their integration, and we had defined locations for the elevator brackets, battery, compressor, electronics, and defined volumes for the intake and climber. We were cruising! (Right into our next problem!)

The slump is real. We had a number of prototypes to define the individual systems, but assembling them and packaging them all into space took... time. Dealing with the physical, manufactured items took time too. The first version of the elevator was nightmare-ish to work on. We accidentally dropped one of the chains, and it dropped down through the solid tube, out the bottom. It took 2 hours and a strong magnet (and some... carefully selected words...) to get the chain back. It seemed like a lot of teams were struggling this year, integrating all the ideas and mechanisms, having software able to reliably utilize and control the robot functions, and doing so with time to practice and test.

First chassis. First thing it did was put some marks in the wood! Next time, we may want to mount bumpers...

As mentioned, day 22 we had our chassis together and running. It weighed 50.5 lbs by itself. The first thing we did? Threw it up and down the HAB level 1 and 2 for almost an hour. Solid chassis. Looked good. We stayed late and mounted the first stage elevator tubes before heading out. Monday of week 4 (day 24) we hit another integration problem of our own, the elevator gearbox didn't actually fit where it was supposed to. The electrical panel was also sort of... floating in space, and had to match up with a support bar for the climber. We moved some things around and got it all working once again. Day 26 and 27 were all about parts ordering. We needed to get everything that we needed at the lab for final assembly. Funny story, day 29 we found out we spent too much. Oops... We uh, we'll worry about the budget later. We got this.

Except... when we don't. Day 29, we added the current version of the shooter basket CAD into the final assembly with the elevator. We measured the mounting point, allowing us to intake at deck level, then for the first time, brought the elevator all the way up and measured..... Uhm. Oh. We were 2 inches short. We can't score in the top of the rocket. (Nor did we have room for software PID overshoot...) Our tired team worked through that issue, wrestling with bearing spacers and hard-stop thicknesses, and brilliantly gained us back the 2 inches we needed, without adding any overall height. (It was all hiding in the second stage tube!)

Day 35 we had our second chassis assembled and rolling around. We had a full 3-stage elevator on the first chassis, with its gearbox. Day 38 we were able to run the elevator for the first time, at testing speeds. (And found our first issues, and resolved them. Also, chain banging around inside tubes is LOUD!) This was the week of our completely organized madness. Our machine schedule had us pumping out parts for the shooter, the ground intake, and the climber. We were de-burring, bending, drilling, and bolting like crazy. Our software team was sitting, twiddling their thumbs. (Ok not really. Fun story - the software team used the 2018 drive train to test pretty much all subsystems on the robot that would exist on the 2019 bot. The 2018 drive train had multiple motors, encoder feedback, and we could measure accurate travel distance. It all worked rather well!)

It was also about this time that we started thinking about our weight. (The robot was pretty heavy too. Ahhhh, 6 years, that joke never gets old...) Several components (elevator, electronics) were on their v2 or v3 spec, so we were re-cutting with added lightness. For the climber and shooter, we added lightness where we could, but these systems were still very untested, so we didn't go crazy.

Our mostly assembled climber, prepped for mounting and testing.

Day 42 we had it all, and with no time to spare. Our climber was assembled. Our intake and shooter were assembled. Day 43 we ran the elevator for the first time in anger, full power! And subsequently ripped the gearbox out of its mounting plate. Strangely, this was actually the least of our worries (with 3 days until bag).

We placed the robot, climber, intake, and everything that we currently had on a scale.

135 pounds.

With known omissions.

That's... not good. Do we got this?

The big unknown that we had been discussing in and out, all season long, came flying toward us like the head of a hammer that broke off its handle halfway through a swing. But let's back up one more time. (Back-up-ception!)

Several times during the season we did think about alternate ideas, and sought assistance from some well known names in FRC. Our thoughts were around - what if we can't get both the climber and the cargo/hatch/elevator mechanism within the time frame (or weight/power/packaging limitations?) How feasible is solo-ing a rocket anyway? What would be the trade-off of making a low-only scoring robot with a climber? We asked these questions internally, as well as asking some friends abroad. We "asked" JVN, from team 148. (In reality this meant going back to his 2019 Robot Priorities post and looking at where he had climbing and rocket RP ranked.) We proceeded to ask this same conundrum to 5803 Apex, 1678 Citrus Circuits, 1241 Theory6, and more. I called my dad and asked. I asked the barista at Starbucks. (We live in Seattle, deal with it.) We got so much input, we didn't quite know what to do with it all. But they all seemed to agree on the main points: the climber would be better to guarantee the ranking position, while the higher level of play would swing to favoring a fast rocket robot. (In hindsight... yep. They were right. Thanks again everyone!) 

So we had to choose - would we be better off controlling our fate by ranking higher with the climb? Or attempting to squeak through districts and hope that every alliance we would play with at District Championships and World Championships would have a climber? This decision would not be made lightly by our students or mentors, and is probably the leading cause for T's graying hair.

And we're back. 135 pounds. With some known parts missing. The elevator has been tested, the hatch collector has been tested, but neither the cargo ground intake or the climber have been finished or tested. What do we do?

Early CAD of the elevator, climber, and cargo shooter. A lot changed. And was added. And was removed.

Being a head coach is tough. Being a mentor is tough. In FIRST, in careers, in personal project time, it's the hardest thing to spend time, effort, and passion on something, and not see the final outcome. T made the final decision as head coach. With three days until the robot had to get put in a bag, we needed to finish a robot that could do <something>. The climber was removed. The impact of this decision would affect each sub-team - software, electrical, mechanical, strategy, and drive team. It was a hard hit, but we had work to do. (I probably liken it to the Band of Brothers episode called 'The Breaking Point'. Struggle through everything that gets thrown at you, and still manage to make it out through the other side.) These are life lessons. Days like this, and those that immediately follow, are what builds character, and makes CyberKnights.

The next three days were spent on the million detail tasks. Finally, at 8:30 on day 45, 24 hours and 30 minutes until bag, we had our first full software shakedown. We immediately broke one of the mounting points on our ground intake. Day 46 was spent fixing a million more tiny details. At 5:00 we let our drivers loose with the robot, and it. was. fast. At 6:00 we started our bag process - unbolting and removing the electronics and elevator. The robot sat from 8:00 until 8:59, when we wrapped it into its bag.

About 15 minutes before this picture was taken, this thing was bolted into the robot with stuff bolted to it...

Wow. A lot happens in 6 weeks. Actually though, we ran a 7 week build season. The next week we ran full, crazy, week 6 hours to get our second robot manufactured and assembled. (Also, we broke the new elevator once more for good measure. We raised the elevator, collected a cargo, then lowered the elevator on top of it. This was fine.)

That's our honest, days and numbers review of our build. I've already posted in detail about our competitions here (if you really feel like re-living all the action!)

SunDome
Glacier Peak
Auburn
Tacoma
Houston

So, Who Are The 4911 CyberKnights This Year?

Our dearly beloved, and departing, seniors for 2019.

Well, there's a complete story of all the things we did as a team. The ups, downs, goods, bads, and eh, some uglys. How does this all relate to 'Who are the CyberKnights'? Throughout all the things we did, there are a number of common threads, philosophies, driving forces, and well, just some plain old fun, that continue to make us who we are.

Robustness

This was a double edged sword for us this year. Every year, as we analyze mechanisms, operations, and manufacturing, we look at how robust each component will be. We take a much more critical look at anything that extends outside of the frame/bumper perimeter. (148 posted a great gif of their 2018 robot getting munched against the scale. Due to their flexible and robust intake, they suffered no damage and continued play as if nothing happened.) We were overly cautious this year with our concept reviews for climbing options, as we were terrified of our partners robot careening directly into our mechanism and munching it against the HAB. In hindsight, we may have been able to alleviate these concerns with good communication and planning over the course of matches, but, that's hindsight. Our ground intake was another key item this year. We knew we wanted to use software control to make it as fast as possible (spend as little time outside the frame perimeter as possible), and we used pneumatics to deploy it, allowing us to slam into the walls and letting the piston stroke absorb the impact. Overall, I think it all worked well.

Modularity

We have tried keeping to this principle since 2016. Modularity allows us to iterate fast, using common mounting points and/or power sources. This year, we had a common bolt pattern on our elevator carriage. (We uh, didn't end up doing anything about this really. Time and resource allowed us to think a lot about what we might change, <but> we didn't actually do anything about it.) Our ground intake also.... sorta worked here. Our piston mounts were difficult to swap, but we had pivot mounts that could be used for our v3 intake. (This did get designed and was roughly 90% complete. This would have gained us another ~2 pounds of weight allowance, and would have been fully pneumatic.) Our drive gearboxes were mounted with 4 bolts. (Nice and easy when we tried swapping to NEO's.) Our wheels still use the same split bearing captures, allowing us to swap them in less than 2 minutes. (This came in handy when we cracked a wheel during a HAB 2 ascent in Tacoma.)

Reliability

We have run every second of every official match for the past two years. 149 matches with no major mechanical failures. (Wow. I hadn't fully looked up this stat before... that's crazy.) Much of this comes from our mantra on robustness. A lot of this comes from our practice in the lab, breaking as much as we can as early as we can. Some of it comes from our operational excellence in the pit. Some of it comes from our driver training and avoiding dangerous situations. And well, some of it comes from pure plain old luck. 

But wait! Our elevator acted all wonky at Houston, we cracked a wheel at Tacoma, and Sundome... was... well, Sundome! How can we possible claim perfect reliability!? Houston and Tacoma are easy to describe - we could still drive and score. It wasn't behaving as expected, but we were able to drive around the problem. Sundome - we prioritized our fixes and replacements to ensure we could contribute to our alliance. Every second of every match, we could drive, we could play defense, we could score during the sandstorm period. And well, we could score hatch panels. In our first few matches in Sundome, sure, we could not score cargo, or score hatch panels above level 1. But every time we added to the robot, we did not regress, we did not negatively affect any existing functionality. We kept our gearboxes greased, our electrical panel organized and visible, our pneumatic lines and bends secure, and all the bolts torqued and loc-tited. The number one reason for our success these past 2 years has been our reliability. We'll keep things simple, keep them running, and we will be competitive in the future.

Our elevator designer, constantly tweaking, tuning, and checking everything.

Focus

Losing the climber may have been a blessing in disguise. It allowed us to focus almost entirely on scoring game elements. All our drive practice, software, and mechanical upgrades revolved around scoring faster and faster. During matches, strategic planning, and post-match discussion, our focus was on scoring more game elements. And fast. Needless to say, with a single focus, we became very good at what we did. This focus also starts in build season. Our two main pit crew students were the designers of our elevator and chassis. Their focus on their areas of ownership greatly aided our reliability while at events. Our strategy kept focused on their work, keeping up to date with how the game play was evolving week over week. (This was especially helpful in driving our practice, given that our first event was week 3. We knew how we had to play in order to be competitive.) Our scouting team as ever remained focused on every match at every meet we attended. Their data fed our drive team and our alliance selections. Our drive team focused on one match at a time, not seeking out the current rank or future matches throughout the weekend. (And well, the whole team focused on time management among robotics, schoolwork, and family. ... In that order... :-D)

Perseverance

Woah boy, perseverance this year. Five competitions in six weeks. Having to get up and move forward after the slow and de-moralizing moments of build season. Trying and trying and trying to get a gentle and repeatable level 2 climber. And yet, throughout build, and at every competition we had smiles, camaraderie, laughs, and energy. At some point or another, every CyberKnight probably has a story about perseverance - failing and trying again, making a mistake and learning, growing and molding into agents of positive change. We try first to avoid, then overcome troubles. We continuously try to improve. But at the core of it all, we simply try.

So, who are the 4911 CyberKnights? And who is that maniac?

Service

Throughout the season, we ran behind schedule. The blizzard wreaked havoc on attendance, as did the flu. We got to a point where we had a backlog of parts to machine, assemble, and test. We were running right up against our budget. We had so many things to worry about for ourselves. And yet when other FIRST teams came to us, asking for a bit of help or support, we always did what we could to say yes. In the midst of this build season, we cut parts for three local PNW teams, we had students at PNW events where we were and weren't competing, helping teams enact repairs and improvements. We maintained communications and relationships with FRC teams around the world through the Compass Alliance and more. We kept up with our Skype calls to our Ugandan FLL teams.

Helping and supporting others is a core value of King's Schools, and is one of the key ingredients of FIRST's Gracious Professionalism. Service to others is a common component of almost any program purposed with building and growing contributing members to society. We understand the value of improving and fulfilling ourselves through service to others. (As a mentor, yeah, I can't even put it all into words!)

Strategize For Now And Later

Our fearless drive team, competing at the Houston World Championship Event.

I touched on this point above, but when we analyze a game and the strategy we believe will provide the most success, we do our best to make historically based inferences as to how the game will grow and evolve from week 1 to week 8 of competition. Our goal for game play/robot development is to be successful throughout the entire competition season. We need to analyze the early season, as this is where the points progression begins. To compete at Worlds, you need to qualify for District Championships. To compete at District Championships, you need to perform well at District meets. So we need to balance out our robot starting point and development with our expectation of the game evolution. Hopefully, this lets us earn enough points at the local events and land in a place where we will be competitive at the highest levels of play. The obvious answer is: make the best robot you can right from the start! However, especially in 2019, we saw a number of historically top teams struggle at their early events. We ourselves were quite nervous about our district rankings going into district championships. Fortunately, (again), we did qualify, just as the level of play came to suit our specific robot.

Software and Sensors

I'll expand this a little to include pre-build-season-preparation. This year, we looked a lot into sensors and software control. (We won both the Autonomous Award and the Innovation in Controls Award at District events, very rightly so in my opinion.) Many teams (1678, 971, 254, 125) put out great resources for designing and building great robots. This past November and December, I specifically watched a number of 971 videos and shared them with the team. I was completely caught up by the concept that they would design a single rotating mechanism, and would think about or implement four control sensors. For just one joint. (For reference - potentiometer as an analog, absolute position sensor. Encoder as a discrete, derived position. Limit switches for the software stop high and low.) We usually threw a single encoder or a potentiometer onto our mechanisms, and called it a day. We took the lessons shared in their fall series Youtube videos and did our best to apply them to this years robot.

This effort was helped by the acquisition of a new electrical mentor. If you have anyone (student, mentor parent, whomever) as a champion for an idea and they get even one more person to listen, the idea will generally become reality. For us, this new mentor was able to bring more options and types of sensors and feedback to our arsenal. We swapped the types of limit switches we used. We added a beam break sensor into our cargo shooter. Our elevator had an encoder, a potentiometer, and a limit switch (lower only, but hey, 3 out of 4 ain't bad!). Most importantly, we incorporated the ideas of controllable systems directly into the concept and CAD phases of our build. (Mounting them on the robot did become buried in the day of a million little tasks, but hey, they did get added!)

Another great item we added as a first for this year was visible feedback for the drivers. We ran a multi-color LED string across the front and back of our electronics board so that our driver, from however far away, could determine certain actions or changes in the robot state. (No more chasing cargo around, hoping we brought it into our shooter. The lights would change color when the beam break sensor was triggered.) Much of our investment into software and controls came directly from lessons and learnings from top teams. In 1678's Strategic Design Workshop one of the described golden rules is - steal from the best, invent the rest. We certainly did that this year. (We also stole one of our team colors from a certain team in Texas. I'm pretty sure that alone gives us 10 horsepower.)

The Only Constant In Life Is Change

The CyberKnights: A Family, and More

2AM frisbee. It was so cold, one of the times the frisbee bounced on the pavement, it just shattered. :-(

Every year with new students, different leaders, and new opportunities, each cluster of CyberKnights thinks of themselves a little differently. There are a number of core common traits that persist, and there are some core characteristics and beliefs that the on-going coach and mentor staff constantly check and instill as necessary. Some years are easier than others to make sure the life lessons we are trying to teach are getting understood and practiced.

CyberKnights, as with most FIRST teams, always become a group that celebrates the fun (the memes...), the shared time together, and the family-esque bonds that develop. But CyberKnights have risen to be more than just an FRC family. Like our robots, we are reliable and dependable. This has led to us being a group that other teams look to for assistance. We also think big. It sounds scary, it sounds intimidating, and it sounds almost unbelievable, but the CyberKnights are capable and practiced at changing the world. When we first broached this idea and this topic a few years ago, I heard this claim, and didn't fully believe it. I thought it was a nice, feel-good, motivational claim. But once it was further explained, how each life we involve ourselves in, each program we start and sustain, and each opportunity we introduce impacts real people across the globe, I too started to believe. Each year of CyberKnights has the capability to build a great robot, and change the world. There's the story about the teenager walking through the sand, tossing beached starfish back into the water. Another person calls out to them 'you can't help them all', to which the teen replies, 'That's alright. I can help this one, and this one, and this one...' For each of those recovered starfish, the world has been changed for them. The CyberKnights now challenge you to think big, and change the world.

What Will We Change For Next Year

Well, not too much. Hah, kidding. There are always improvements to be made. 2020 will be a very interesting year, given the lack of 'stop build day'. Our planned schedule will probably not change however. We will try to better follow our schedule next year, which will allow us more time to shakedown and iterate early. One item I will specifically look at next year will be simple and lightweight solutions. Simple is generally more robust and reliable. Reliability is the number one reason for our recent success. So, yeah, we're going to try to keep that going. Our software will continue to grow and evolve over this summer. This year we made a few leaps forward and it really showed. Continuing to automate systems and simplify controls will only further increase our robot capabilities. (And make them go more faster. And I like more faster-er.) Next year though, we will have to contend with a few more changes to our team, and something new that we haven't come across in our previous six years.

What A Long, Strange Trip Its Been

Our favourite maniac, head coach, friend, father, motivator, inspiration, and so much more.

I had been staring at my shoes for several minutes. I could hear the sniffles of the other mentors around me. "Now is a great time. The team is on a upswing and will keep getting better. This person will be able to bring the team through this next progression." T had just announced that he would be moving schools at the end of the year. He would no longer be head coach of the CyberKnights. He would spend next January and February with a healthy diet and a doctor approved amount of sleep. The rest of us stood and stared.

Change happens in a lot of cases, it's very difficult to process in the moment. T has been the cornerstone of the CyberKnights for the past decade. The FTC teacher, the FRC coach, the second father to so many students and mentors alike. Our job now is to take this change as an opportunity to continue to growth and achievement of ourselves and the team. We are now the ones who will have the understanding, of who are the 4911 CyberKnights, and who they will become in the next decade. Our maniac, T, has his robotics family and his love here, but Mr. Thompson also had his own family and his own love, to which he will now be able to dedicate more of himself toward. We all will miss you, and wish you the best times with family and friends. (Though this isn't goodbye. I still have your phone number bwahaha!)

At The End Of The Day

The 2019 FRC 4911 CyberKnights. Doing silly things.

We, are the 4911 CyberKnights. (Advice from one of our seniors - Just send it.)

-B