needles & vectors

Well, I didn’t think this would be accomplished. No, that’s wrong, I thought it would be but far after the 1001 days were over. I actually thought about changing it to something else because the team’s success is not under my control. Then couldn’t figure out what to change it to: get two new sponsors, start some sort of spirit team, get three more girls involved. Out of laziness I kept it as written.

Thursday, Friday, and yesterday the LA Regional was held up at the LA Sports Arena. I didn’t attend Thursday’s practice rounds due to my Power Plant class but apparently we had lots of problems. We were seven pounds overweight (goodbye outriggers to keep us from falling over, 2 wheels, and little bits of aluminum) and had a major coding error that made our pneumatics cease to work after autonomous hybrid mode. But we finally passed inspection and made it to every single practice round – plus several more when FIRST was struggling to find working robots to fill out the rounds. Friday we won six out of seven qualifying rounds. I’ll spare all of the details about the one loss that should’ve been a win – it involves 1/4 of a second of lost radio communication and FIRST being idiots. Ended the day ranked 4th. Yesterday we lost (I think) both of our last qualifying rounds but finished as the 11th place seed. Despite our high seed, I was still surprised when we were chosen to join the 4th place alliance. Of course, five or so teams declined to join the alliance before us – the plight of a rookie team with a not-great robot that gets ranked well – but we were excited nonetheless. We ended up losing in the quarterfinals; the lack of strong alliance mates plus our falling over 30 seconds into the second match did us in.

But look at it this way: our previous best seed was 25th. Last year was the first time we even made it to all of the practice rounds. I have a feeling we’re going to have a much easier time recruiting students to join the team next year. We’re even talking about building two identical robots next season.

My best shot of us in action isn’t real great. Seating isn’t exactly ideal for getting action shots unless you’re on the crew (and then you don’t care).

The balls are randomly ordered on the overpass so you never know if you’re ball will be in front of you when you start.

Alliance pairings always take forever. Tito, our rep, is just to the left of the overpass.

I had fun making fun of several of the guys for playing chess in the pit between rounds.

Rest of the photos from this weekend are here. Photos from the build season are here, here, here, and here.