Our first competition in the 2017-2018 season was beset by numerous issues, but we were able to fix a surprising number of problems with both mechanical, electrical, and programming. Many of our team members stayed up very late before the competition due to the sudden breakage of one of the drive base’s brass pinion gears when we were testing it at the Playspace, San Jose. Because this setback forced us to return to the shop and drill a custom clamp for the gear, we were unable to continue testing our relic grabber or autonomous. Both of our drivers lost a lot of sleep, which mitigated their performance the following day. During the competition, we were forced to think quickly, duct taping our dubiously connected mini-USB ports, fixing a pulley on our relic slide, and super gluing the broken pinion gear. Our team worked together and created innovative solutions to these problems, and by the end of the qualification round, we placed 7th out of all the teams at the qualifier. We never would have improved our driver practice and autonomous code without the generous donation of a practice field from WarriorBorgs 2891 as well as glyphs/game elements from other teams. The problems we faced, in addition to connectivity issues, ultimately proved to be too much to recover from entirely, and we failed to enter the elimination rounds of the tournament. Despite not competing at a high level this tournament, we are incredibly motivated and proud of our recognition by the judges at the competition, winning the Inspire Award for our journey as a team and as a member/ambassador for FIRST/STEM communities.
All of our awards and nominations:
Because we could not test our relic mechanism the night before, our game plan at Google was to simply go for the glyphs during teleop, and score a major lead with an 85 point autonomous. Issues with driver practice, connectivity, an unreliable (albeit constantly improving) autonomous, and robot design forced us to abandon an early plan to follow the cipher patterns. We are hard at work redesigning our robot for a smoother implementation at Cisco!