Waterford District Competition (Week 2)

We earned 14 points in our first district event. With the estimated cutoff point to qualify for state at 60 points, it meant that we would need to rank high after qualifying round, be an alliance captain or get picked early and at least get to the finals in order to have enough points to qualify for States. Despite the odds, the team was determined to try to do just that.

The robot was running great on Friday. The autonomous program was working as planned and hung an ubertube on the top row 80% of the time. We were completing two logos on the top row all by ourselves in most matches. The minibot deployment was finally completed and we tried it after the 6th match. The success rate was very high even though it was not the fastest minibot on the field. Despite the success of our robot, our win-loss record did not reflect that. On Saturday, our program was accidentally erased and we could not compete in one of our matches. In the next two matches, there were some small problems with the wrist and we were not able to hang as many tubes. Even with that, our scouting data showed that our robot had hung the most number of tubes on the top row out of all the teams there. We finished the qualifying round ranked 6th and were picked by the alliance captain #2. We gladly accepted the offer and worked hard to reach the finals.

Even though we lost in the finals, we were happy that we had accomplished our goal to finish qualifying round with a high ranking, to get picked early and to get to the finals. That plus winning the Best Website award and Entrepreneurship award gave us a total of 74 points which should be high enough to get us qualified for States.

Kettering District Competition (Week 1)

We arrived at Kettering very excited. There is always an extra level of excitement for a week 1 event since nobody knows how the game is actually going to be played. Our pit continued with the medieval theme. This year there were some enhancements with the addition of lights and coverings on the top among other things.

One of the charms of Kettering is that you can sit very close to the field. Last year was the first year we played at Kettering and we had a great time.

Unfortunately, our robot did not work properly throughout Friday and Saturday during qualifying round. Between the last minute rush to finish the robot and having used up most of the 6 hours of access time, there was not enough time spent on testing. The problem was finally traced to a software programming error. Unfortunately it was found after our last qualifying round match, so none of the teams saw what we could really accomplish with our robot. Consequently we were not picked to play in the elimination round.

However we did pick up two awards, the Best Website award and the Engineering Inspiration award so we did not leave empty handed. We won the same awards a year ago at Kettering also. The team was kind of disappointed because not making it to elimination would make it very hard to get enough points to qualify for State Championship.