Qualifying Meet 1 Recap and the Scramble Leading Up to It!

We had our first league qualifying meet this past weekend, and it really was exciting! In all that excitement, it has been hard to get this blog post ready to go before now. We are genuinely sorry to leave you hanging for more, but if you've ever been on an FTC team, you know competition is a big event, especially the first one.

I'll start with the stuff that happened before we went to our first qualifying meet over the weekend. In the spirit of procrastination, we finished building our robot two days before our meet. We also added and tested our code at that point and our drivers got in their first practice session on the field. This is what the first meet is like every year, though, and it's the same for just about every team. We all get about two months from kickoff to design, build, and program a fully-functional robot. There were many teams in our league that only had partially-complete or no robot at all! There were only a handful of teams that had an autonomous program and many more (including us) that were changing their program and hardware throughout the day.

So, two days before the competition, our lift system was still in its final stages of being built.

Per the instructions that came with the materials we have for the lift, we added string to all the pulleys and attached it to the motor on a big spool. Rotating the motor to tighten the string pulls the lift up, and rotating the other way to give slack in the string allows the lift to fall back down with the help of the forces of gravity on our claw.

Speaking of claw, we also attached that to our robot officially before our competition. If you remember from our previous blog posts, we had a lot of trouble with our claw design before. This time around, we had to make the claw fit exactly within the 18 inch cube for our initialized starting position. This only involved a little bit of hacksaw work to cut a few extrusions to the exact length we needed. This was one of the easier claw fixes, if I'm being honest.

Completed lift and claw (about 2 days before competition)

So, we got everything together with less than 48 hours to our first meet. (Whoops! Are we procrastinators, or what?!)

We tested out the programming we had written for the first time that same day. Luckily, there were not disastrous problems with the code and hardware combination. We were able to do just about anything we had intended to do with the robot, but, as to be expected, we had a few tweaks to make with the code and hardware.

The biggest of which was the fact that our carousel spinner kept falling off as we went over the barriers to the warehouse. We moved a few pieces around and were able to secure the shaft with the extra grippy wheels in place so it didn't pop off anymore.

First driver practice with the robot, and we're already scoring points!

We did a few more things (changing the rubber bands, adding our team numbers and alliance markers, adding warning labels, etc.) to make sure our robot was competition ready.

Completed robot ready for competition!

Now, the part you've been waiting for: how'd we do at competition?

The answer is really "fine". We placed 17 in our league, which is right about the middle of the pack. The top two or three teams were very good and had good autonomous programs that scored them lots of points. They are also significantly further ahead than the teams even a few places below them. This isn't exactly bad that we aren't doing so hot. It's still early in the season, after all. I like to think of it as a good thing. We have room for improvement, and we have a ton of changes we want to make to our robot before the next meet inspired, for the most part, off of those top team's robots.

This meet was only a qualification meet. We played 5 matches and scored a total of 206 points for our team (that's 48, 48, 80, 2, and 28 for each match). We played good and are extremely proud of our team and the robot (who still doesn't have a name!!!) for doing so well and persevering through some rough competition. This game is going to be much harder than it looked at kickoff, and we are going to have to do some serious brainstorming if we want to move up the ranks in our league. In fact, robot improvements are already underway for our unnamed robot, but I'll save those details for the next blog post!