Competition 2: Sammamish

 A picture says a thousand words...

2022-03-20

Once again, I failed to take any pictures - (big grin) - but we won! After 12 qualifying matches, we ranked #1 and were able to choose our partners for the elimination tournament. Alongside teams from Lake Washington High School and Eastlake High School, we captured victory in the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and after some un-needed excitement - we triumphed against an alliance of teams from Interlake High School, Newport High School, and the International School in Bellevue. 

Overall, this competition was significantly smoother from a robot perspective - fewer issues during matches, more consistent climbing for end-game points, and it showed. Our major learning was the climber - it worked significantly better than our previous, but with so little time to test in the lab, we encountered a few more issues throughout the weekend.

On the software side, we set current (amperage) limits on our motors to prevent "bad things". For the new climber, we identified cases where the limit was too low during normal operation. Simply bump up a number, re-deploy the code, and we were good to go!

Mechanically, the winches and pulleys were installed and set up correctly, however any overlap or pinching could cause the deploy to not work correctly. By the end of day 1, we found a process to reliably reset the climber mechanism, ensuring consistent tension on the winch as it spooled.

Here's how our new climb worked (skip to 2:15):

And for the full drama - here's our 3 finals matches:

Final 1

Yep, we fell again. Not good.

Final 2

Sure looks like things are broken, how bad did it get? What all did we break from the fall?

Final 3

Whewwwwwww! and WOOOOO!!!!!!

So... what happened?

This happened.

During the climb in Finals 1 - we snapped this belt which connects the motor to the mechanism, causing us to drop quite rapidly.

Before the second match, we were so flustered by identifying this issue that we didn't go through our full pre-match checklist. The fall had also disconnected a few wires - unknown to us as we started the second match.

While we still could not fix our climbing mechanism, we were able to re-connect all our wires and test the functionality to collect and score Cargo balls. We drove smoothly and cleanly during the third match to win the event!

Sammamish is a brand new event this year - we got medals but no banner!

This earns us a spot at the District Championship event, hosted at Eastern Washington University in 3 weeks time!

-B