Niles District Event (Week 4)

This was our first time going to Niles Michigan for a competition. We had heard from others that the gym was small, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that there were plenty of seats. We only made minor changes to the robot since the robot performed well at Waterford. Once again, we set a goal to reach the finals and win two awards.

We did very well in the qualifying round, winning 9 of 12 matches. We ended up seeding 7^th and we were picked 5^th overall by Team 27. We then selected Team 3572. We had a great alliance in the elimination round. Team 27 is a great scorer in teleop and they can get the two balls on the coopertition bridge during autonomous. Team 3572 is very good at scoring the two balls in the hybrid mode. We won the quarterfinals and then beat the number 1 alliance in the semifinals. In the finals, Team 27’s robot hit the wall really hard and broke down. We had no chance with the excellent defense that our opposing alliance was doing. We lost both matches quickly.

We reached our goal to get to the finals and we also won two awards: Website award and Entrepreneurship award. The team did a great job at Niles.

Waterford District Event (Week 2)

This is the first year we did not participate in a Week 1 competition event. In the first few years as a new team, it was better for us to play in a week 1 event since it is more of a level playing field when nobody has played the game yet and no one knows what to expect. However, last year we tried to design an all-around robot and ran out of time to fully test the robot which resulted in our robot not working properly at our week 1 competition. Based on that experience, we decided against week 1 events. It was a good decision because we ran out of time again this year so the extra week was very useful.

We arrived at Waterford High School with high expectations. During the build season, we put equal emphasis on the building of the robot and the preparation work for winning the awards. Our goal was to get to the finals and win two awards.

Competition was fierce. Our robot worked better than we expected even though we had very limited time to calibrate the shooter. Our programmer did a fantastic job putting in a lot of last minute changes. It was nice to finally see the fruits of our labor when the bridge lowering device worked and we could shoot two balls into the basket during hybrid mode.

The semifinals match was very close. We tied after the first two matches. In the third match, we were ahead by 8 points but were accidentally flipped by our alliance partner when we tried to balance on the bridge with them. We ended up losing by two points.

However we were pleasantly surprised to win 3 awards at the event. We won the Best Website award, Engineering Inspiration award, and Imagery award. I was most proud of our team winning the Imagery award. In our rookie year, our robot got laughed at because it was built with the cheapest material we could find. The students felt bad when they saw other team’s robot with nice paint and expensive polycarbonate sheets. In the last two years, our robot looked progressively better but we focused more on function than the look. This year, discussion on robot appearance started right in the beginning. We decided to follow the same theme as our pit, website and newsletter. The robot looks very nice and it is easy to identify that it is our team.