Hi everyone! We had a blast at competition, and we’re excited to share our experience with all of you; from the weeks leading up to the event, to the stressful days of crunch time, to the complete dopamine rush we had at St. Ignatius, we have a lot of stories to share from our final weeks of our main season!
These past two weeks have been very busy finishing our robot and preparing for the competition! After putting our input, output, and transfer mechanisms together, we’ve been working on fine-tuning the robot by filing, wiring, and adjusting parts. We’re still working on reducing the robot’s weight, but we’re now only a few pounds over. We’ve been regularly testing the input and output to make sure the ball doesn’t get stuck. As Parth, one of our mentors, said, we need to focus on “calibration, calibration, calibration,” especially for the climb and turret parts.
We’re starting to test the robot’s code on the main chassis, and are integrating the code into the electronics! The batteries and sensors are now online, and we’re hoping to start driving a fully functional robot around in the coming days. For now, though, we’re running drive practice with our secondary chassis so we can determine our most skilled drivers for competition.
We’ve also created new subgroups for competition prep! One of these groups is the scouting group, who are devising a plan to take efficient notes on other teams’ robots during the competition. When it’s time to choose alliances for the playoff tournament segment of the competition, these notes will be instrumental to determining which teams’ robots are complementary to our own. Sophia has been leading some of the middle school team members in testing out different scouting strategies using recordings of FRC competitions that have already happened this season; they’re steeling themselves for a few different challenges like having to use paper-based methods due to the wifi’s instability at competition. Right now, they’re working on a system that relies on tally marks for this season’s scouting in order to avoid a problem we found in our 2019 scouting system, which was conflict of handwriting and note style. They’re hoping that this new and improved system will make sure all of this important data can be easily compiled and interpreted when the time comes!
Another subgroup is working on team spirit. Our Awards Manager, Arjun C, started thinking about ways to win awards with a unified theme, like a name for our robot. Our team won an award every season and we are determined to keep up that tradition. Pooja led a group that was working on creating signs to show support for our team. We have also ordered some merchandise to boost our team’s spirit, including some very symbolic bandanas and pins and stickers to hand out to other teams.
Quick update, since we’ve run into some minor problems on our way to the competition on Saturday!
The RoboRIO 2.0, the brain of the robot, stopped taking commands for a little while, so we weren’t able to do nearly as much testing as we would have liked. We ended up removing the RoboRIO 1.0 from our testing robot to replace it. It’s not like it had been doing anything over there, since the drive testing that we’d been using it for had been on hold for a little while due to the fact that the radio wasn’t receiving any commands as well as what we’ll call “minor electronic failures.” (Timo plugged a motor controller in backwards and the robot started spinning circles at a blistering speed before we threw a couch on it and tackled it into submission). We managed to fix the problems there though, due to the hard work of our mentor Don!
Hang team has been hard at work testing their mechanism, and, good news: we managed to complete a full cycle to traversal! Bad news: on the test immediately thereafter, the robot’s 200-pound-rated fishing line pulleys broke and sent the robot plummeting to the ground from three feet in the air without warning. Turns out, one of the pieces within the hang system was essentially acting like a knife whenever we winched it up, and over time, it simply cut the string. So we removed that part!
Drive code has been facing an interesting problem recently. When the joystick is pushed forwards, we want the robot to move forwards. When you tilt the stick right, we would like it to turn right. Then when you move it backwards, it should go backwards. And then when you twist the stick left, it should turn accordingly. Now imagine that all of those controls were shifted by 90º, and no one knew why. This took us nearly two hours to solve. Then, when all was said and done, the robot would still move slightly to the right whenever we wanted it to move backwards, and it also started making a weird clanking noise whenever we moved it, as if something was stuck in the gearbox that we couldn’t find no matter how many times we disassembled it.
At this point, with the robot still in a very precarious position, and nearly no further time to test or refine before the competition, all we can really do is pack up our things into the truck on Thursday (tomorrow) for the registration on Friday, and hope that the weekend’s competition goes well! Here’s hoping!
41 teams, including RobotX, attended the San Francisco Regional competition. The weekend was fun, stressful, and a great learning experience for us all rolled into one, and the robot’s previous malfunctions either ironed themselves out or were fixed by our amazing pit team! The competition lasted three days; Friday was for setup, robot inspection, and practice, Saturday for ranking matches, and Sunday for the final bracket.
After meeting at KLS early in the morning on Friday, we made our way to St. Ignatius in San Francisco for the competition. We picked a place in the stands and started working on our robot at our station in the “pits”. Although we expected inspection to be a bit tough due to the closeness of our robot’s weight to the limit, we quickly passed and were able to start preparing for the practice matches. Each match consisted of a red and a blue alliance, each with three teams’ robots. Our robot’s best feature was our hang mechanism, which was made to reach the highest rung, the traversal bar. This was also our most delicate mechanism and it ended up needing to be fixed after every match. However, we were still able to reach traversal multiple times during the practice matches. Not a lot of teams were able to consistently do so, so we were hoping this would give us a big advantage.
On Saturday, we started participating in ranking matches and scouting. There were around 80 total matches and alliances were randomized for each. Our team played in 12 of those matches (which you can view here), and our success rate in them determined whether we would be able to participate in the finals the next day. Our matches had overall pretty good results, with 8 wins and 4 losses. The energy in the room was palpable every time our robot worked its way up to the highest bar, culminating in a massive rush of dopamine if it stuck the landing, or abject horror if the slightest thing went wrong. In one match, another team’s robot hit ours and bent our gearbox. Luckily, our pit team was able to fix it up in time for our next match! We kept hoping to be able to practice using the test field between each match, but every time, there’d be a new problem that appeared on the robot, so we ended up having to spend most of our time in the pit.
Even so, we placed 6th out of all 41 teams at the competition! This is RobotX’s highest rank in on-season competitions, so we were very happy with our placement. This also meant we got the chance to be an alliance captain and choose which teams we wanted on our alliance for the regional championships. Although alliance selection wasn’t as ideal as we’d hoped, we were joined by two great teams, 7565 and 4765. We then proceeded to quarterfinals, where we faced off against the 5th ranked alliance, though we lost in the best of 3 set. We ended up blaming this performance on a wire that we noticed was out of place just before the quarterfinals, and upon plugging it back in, our launch power increased threefold, which messed with our drivers’ instinctual calibration. Even though missing out on the semifinals was a minor disappointment to the team, we learned a lot about how our robot worked and how to improve it. The team is excited to apply our new knowledge in the October offseason competition, CalGames, and expand on this year’s robot during offseason workshops (details coming later)!
These past few months have been an amazing experience for our team. Participating in our first normal season after a few years of the pandemic allowed us to grow and learn so much. The support we’ve received from mentors, families, friends, and sponsors have been instrumental in our success and will continue to help us in the future. Here’s our budget rundown for this season:
This season, we spent $16,000 on tools, field and robot parts, and merchandise. Our fundraising goal was $20,500, to provide for this season and allow us to go further in future seasons. And the amount we raised was…$29,500!
We’d like to give a big thank-you to our entire community! Your donations, both in time and money, have come a long way and will continue to provide for us as we start our off-season activities and prep for CalGames.