Event 1: Glacier Peak

Loaded in and all set up!

The first weekend in March, the main gymnasium and cafeteria of Glacier Peak High School was packed with students, mentors, volunteers, parents, motors, metal, wheels, lights, and music. It sounds like a festival, and it pretty much was. And the first celebration goes to all 34 teams who competed - who in 8 weeks crafted a robot from an empty sheet of paper or blank computer screen. Many congratulations to the Award winners, and the event champions! How did Bearcats do? Well, if you continue reading, you may or may not find out. It's a mystery!

A quick primer on FRC events - Over the course of two days the teams compete in randomly scheduled 3 versus 3 gameplay. Your opposition in one match may be you partner for another - so be nice to everyone. :-) Each team plays 12 matches total, and each match awards Ranking Points (RP) for winning or tying the final score, and for certain gameplay actions - scoring 18 Notes during the match or earning 10 or more points of endgame actions. These Ranking Points, well, rank the teams! After qualifications, the top 8 ranked teams get to choose their alliance partners for a series of elimination matches. They may choose to invite other members from the top 8, or anywhere in the rankings to join, until 8 alliances of 3 teams each are created. We then play a double elimination bracket among the 8 alliances until the final 2 teams play best of 3 matches for the event win! Alongside all that - throughout the weekend judges get to ask students about all their favourite creations and learnings from their robots. During the Elimination rounds, teams may be recognied with technical or culture/community awards!

A few people stopped by to look for our robot.
It's very small and hard to find.

Steal from the best, invent the rest - after every Formula 1 race, an article gets written for the F1 website called "5 Winners and 5 Losers of the <sponsor name - location> Grand Prix". Slightly modifying that format, I would like to present - 5 Successes and 5 Improvements for the Glacier Peak PNW District Event sponsored by nobody in particular but probably the school district, OSPI, and other educational funding sources!

Success - Climber!

Climber fully installed and tested early in the event.

In less than 48 hours we went from 0 climbing apparatus on the robot to having 2 climbers with hooks, mechanically and software tested, and used in a match. And by a match I mean - once we got them on the robot and running, we climbed in all 9 remaining qualification matches. As climbing was one method to score endgame points and contribute to a possible bonus RP, this was important for us to get working as soon as possible! Fortunately we loaded into the event early, arrived early the next morning, and had all the tools and equipment to finish the installation and testing before and between matches. Of the 9 matches we climbed, we earned that bonus RP 3 times, helping improve our ranking.

Improvement - Wrist

This looks like a great climb, but actually our wrist got stuck in a bad position.
Hard to pick up Notes when the intake won't touch the ground...

Hindsight is a powerful tool, as is association. Our first match we scored brilliantly. Our second match we were aiming low. We changed the encoder value, and we started scoring again. Then we started missing again. Finally, we skipped a gear in the 90-degree gearbox. We knew we would be stressing this component, but the specs from WestCoast Products had plenty of safety margin in hand. Toward the end of the evening, we eventually found our issue, despite doing our best job of hiding it. We put a 3D printed casing over the gearbox to prevent <stuff> getting into the bevel gears. Unfortuantely, that casing also hid the gearbox, so when a few bolts started backing out and the casing started opening up, we failed to recognize that. After tightening the gearbox and adding it to the pre-match checklist, our angles remained consistent throughout Sunday's matches. As a team we will evaluate a redesign, spare parts, or other process improvements to ensure we remain consistent with our scoring positions during the next event(s).

Success - Robot Priorities!

Yeaaahhh action shot!
(Imagine that Bear next to us screaming "Yeaaaahhhh!")

If we measure at lunchtime on Saturday, we met all of our top 6 robot priorities - solid drivebase, score from an indexed Speaker position, score in the Amp, climb, drive everywhere, and be a good climbing partner. (We didn't do Trap, pretty intentionally.) This was a rather complex game where we have to manage many different possible robot actions, and our own team skills, resources, and shop capabilities. In certain aspects, I believe we outperformed our resources and have many learnings we can continue through the season and into next year. In our short experience with this team, this is the most high performing and capable robot that we've built. This year's major learning was swerve. Hopefully over the summer and into next year, we can continue our learnings with vision, potentially having it as a resource for our competition robot next year.

Improvement - Intake

Much of our intake looks similar to last year's intake - how we manufacture, capture axles, and propogate movement. With climbers taking some real estate, the intake/launcher had width limitations. The intake area further shrunk due to our 4-ply build methodology. With a narrow intake, the drivers have to work harder to line up and grab Notes, shown quite visibly in a few matches. One other minor flaw was the contour of the intake plates - the polycarb extends beyond the wheels, so if we hit the ground, wall, another robot, the plastic would take first contact, not the wheels or axles. Unfortunately, for some off-center pick-ups, that also meant the first thing that contacted the Note was the polycarb, further reducing the intake's effectiveness. Fortunately, we should be able to modify parts of the polycarb plates and increase the potential intake area.

Success - Operations!

Everyone played their part to keep Oppo in top condition!

Reliability is huge in FRC. Even at Glacier Peak, the highest performing teams would easily lose a match if they or an alliance member was unable to perform their responsibilites. Operationally, we were almost perfect. We drove 100% of every match. In 2 matches we lost the encoder value for the wrist, but just a match later we had manual controls to alleviate that issue. Mechanically, we had a gearbox start to loosen, but technically never failed. (Technically perfect is my favourite kind of perfect.) Electrically, we had one Anderson connector come undone (remember that foreshadowing from last week... <evil grin>) which hindered driving, but we were still able to score in Amp and park at the end of the match. Operational Proficiency is mid-way up the Power Pyramid, but is a layer that we constantly think about and focus on. In racing - to finish first, first you must finish. Same thing with robotics - more time running is more time performing.

Improvement - Sharing Scouting Data

Our drive captain enjoys making plans. Part of those plans relies on data. Scouts gather a lot of data. Our scouts sit in the stands, and our drive captain lives in the pits. At Glacier Peak, we apparently found a force field, where data could not pass between the stands and the pits (at least for us). Not so great! :-D Maybe fortunately, this required us to focus on ourselves and our own alliance capabilities. Unfortunately, we weren't able to incorporate our own decisions to make a special considerations for auto, short cycles, or specific defense. Also fortunately, this is a communication and soft-skills exercise that we can easily incorporate into future events. We are creating a new role for a student to provide data in a timely manner to our drive captain, giving us the ability to more strategically plan each match.

Success - Software!

Our first swerve bot performed admirably!

Early in the season we all complained a lot about software and the chosen libraries for swerve and autonomous pathing. (I mean, <a lot>. Like, so much complaining. I almost quit. Ok maybe not that bad...) With some understanding and usage of the libraries, we found we could start to make changes and the outcome matched the expected behaviour. During the event, we identified new autonomous paths that would help our alliance by re-positioning ourselves and scoring 2 additional points. Also during the event, we created a new path, deployed it, and watched it succeed in the next match - a solid showing that we had learned (a bit) how to use the libraries. Our regular Command-based software is also rather well organized, with many helper functions for individual and grouped functions for arm/wrist movement, intaking, automatic stowing, and more. With so many helpers, we could meanginfully update and build on operator button mapping to help our drive team better synergize with the specific actions of the robot.

Improvement - Software

In a build season, there is a real snowball effect - prototying and design take longer than planned, parts ordering gets delayed, build gets delayed, issues discovered during build further delay things, and so on. In our season calendar, we have more than two weeks at the end of the season dedicated for software bring-up, tuning, control schemes, and autonomous testing and tuning (alongside drive practice and any iteration as we inevitably break things). All the delays early in the season generally impact the final software testing and tuning time - for us, our biggest area of improvement is in autonomous. The opportunity for points here is very high, and while we showed good ability to adapt and use driving paths, integrating paths with controls to obtain and score additional game pieces basically didn't happen before the event. Watch this space though, as we'll have two weeks before Bonney Lake...

Success - Eliminations Play!

Bears and Squirrels and Bearcats, oh my!

Just before lunch on Sunday, the Alliance Selection process occurred, with the top ranked teams able to strategically invite teams to join an alliance with the goal of winning the event. While there were some nerves, we also had confidence that we would be a solid pick for most Alliance Captains. The robot had performed very reliably, and was capable of scoring in multiple locations - Speaker, Amp and Stage, and we were very friendly people! (No Bearcat bites, I promise!) We were indeed picked up by the number 3 Alliance, consisting of ourselves, Captain's CyBears from Seattle and the host school's Sonic Squirrels! We showed both some early and late success in the double elimination tournament, but were eventually knocked out in Match 12, effectively finishing the event in 4th!

Improvement - Setting Expectations

Solid weekend with these goons.

Success generally begets success, but every year the team, the game, and the robot are different. Last year we earned 2 red ribbons during District event play, and this year we hyped ourselves to go one better and earn some blue. At Glacier Peak that didn't happen, and for a few key students, there was disappointment. We always want to perform well, but our expectations should match what we have full control over - we can score cycles, we can help ourselves and other teams prepare for matches, we can scout teams to find optimal alliance partners. If we perform our best at the actions we have full control over - that should be our benchmark for success. Sucess begets success, and eventually some blue can find us.

Wishing all other team's out there good luck and perform well, and we'll see you again in two weeks at Bonney Lake!