The NorCal Regional Championship was held from 2/17-2/18 at Newark Memorial High School in Newark, CA. We were Division Finalists(4th overall) with our alliance partners Roboknights and TogaTech. In addition, we won the Think Award for showing a good design process and a clear understanding of the science behind our robot. Winning the Think Award allowed us to advance to the West Super Regional Championship in Spokane, Washington. We are very excited to compete at this competition next month. We had a great time testing our new relic mechanism that we added to our robot after the Cisco Qualifier. We were able to place our relic standing in the third zone during the end game of the match. Also, our autonomous programming was solid, and we were able to score 85 points. Overall, we enjoyed meeting teams from all over Northern California and learning about their journey to this competition. Watching all of the robots perform on the field was exciting, and we learned a lot about different designs and strategies during the competition. Although we were pretty successful at this competition, we had a few electrical issues that did not allow us to reach some of our goals. Our Rev IMU had trouble initializing during several of our matches, which caused our autonomous to not run. Also, we had to replace our encoder cable because it was not functioning properly. During the last match, our intake jammed, preventing us from intaking glyphs and completing a cipher. We are currently working to fix all of these issues that occurred during our competition. In the weeks before the West Super Regional, we plan to improve our jewel mechanism, electrical system, intake, and relic mechanism. We will be working hard to improve the consistency and reliability of our robot for the West Super Regional. In addition, we will continue spreading FIRST values to our community through a workshop and presentation at a local high school math competition. We plan to conduct an engineering workshop and then relate this activity to robotics and FIRST opportunities. We are looking forward to competing at the West Super Regional from March 8-11 in Spokane, Washington!
With our newly built relic mechanism, our goal was to complete a cipher in around a minute and use the rest of the time to pick up the relic mechanism and place it in the 3rd zone standing. During autonomous, we aimed to get 85 points by knocking off the correct jewel, placing the glyph in the correct spot, and parking in the safe zone. Our autonomous code was successful during the times the electrical system did not break. Similarly, we were mostly successful at filling crypto boxes except for when our intake jammed and did not allow us to intake any glyphs. Our relic mechanism was successful, and we were able to pick up the relic and place it in the 3rd zone standing.