During the opening ceremony of the Michigan State Championship, the MC talked about the history of the Michigan State Championship. The district system started the same year when we were a rookie so this is the fourth time there was a Michigan State Championship. He gave some statistics about the 64 teams that were there how many times they have been at the Michigan State Championship. We were pleasantly surprised that we were one of a small group of teams that made it in all four years.
After the Niles District Competition, we knew we had to improve our robot to be competitive. Our robot never balanced a single time successfully at Niles. That may be good enough at a district event but not at the State Championship. We spent a lot of time designing and building an arm that would rotate down to lower the bridge and rotate down further to help balance the robot on the bridge. Unfortunately, we just barely finished putting it on the practice robot and we were only able to test it once lowering the bridge. We didn't have enough time to test it more because we had to take it out to transfer it to the competition robot once we got to the State Championship event.
We had issues with the chain skipping on the sprocket and we were finally able to fix it Friday afternoon. Unfortunately due to the circumstances, we were not able to demonstrate to the other teams what we can do. We had two more matches on Saturday to show our robot’s ability. The first one was the first match of Saturday right after the opening ceremony when almost everyone there would be watching. In the hybrid mode we shot the two balls in, and as soon as the teleop mode started, we drove to the side of the alliance bridge to lower it to let the two balls roll down. Unfortunately the student who was operating the arm got overly excited and moved the arm down too fast, pushing the bridge down quickly, and continued to push. The arm has so much power that it actually flipped us backwards. I knew at the time that no team would pick us for the elimination round because of this, and unfortunately I was right.
We also did not win a single team award. The only bright moment this weekend was when one of our co-team captains, Ryan Hoyt, winning one of the 6 spots for the Dean’s List Finalist from Michigan. Now he will be competing in St. Louis for the 10 Dean’s List winner spots.