12/19/16
This past weekend, our team was invited to QD Academy in Plano, TX to participate in a scrimmage. There were about 20 teams at the location, all there in hopes to get quality practice with other advanced teams in the region. Therefore, this oppurtunity served as a chance for us to gague how much improvement was neccesary before Qualifiers in January.
Upon arrival at the location with our sister team(Iron Reign team 6832), we recieved our match schedule as shown above. We had about an hour from the time of our arrival to our first match to get set up and test our robot. However, we realized that we had forgotten our laptop with all the code for our robot as well as a complete development environment! This meant that we could not edit the code or get much accomplished with the robot. Lukily, our lead coder, Rohit Shankar, had uploaded the code to our github page during practice the previous day. We were able to find a backup computer and download the code to our robot. We were not able to test the code, however, before our first match had started.
During our first match, we realized that our code was not working properly. First of all, the carwash was coded so that it would constantly be rotating into the launcher regardless of what functions our controller was asking it to do. Another problem we noticed was that the servo attached to the launcher was not a continuous rotation servo. This meant that the servo would not keep rotating but rather only rotate 180 degrees before stopping. The last thing we noticed was that the launcher was not coded at all into the code! This meant that our robot could only pick up balls and then not be able to do anything with them. However, our autonomous code was working so that the robot would partially be on the middle square.
Luckily, our team was paired with many powerful teams. This allowed us to get our technical issues worked out without being eliminated. No coders were present at the scrimmage so our build team attempted to read our code with the assistance from our sister team to code as much as we could. By the time of our last match, our team captian, Austin Davis, was able to get our launcher coded and working. Irononically, we lost our last match. Below is a picture of the end rankings at the scrimmage.
Although we finished at 5th place, we have a lot to improve over the next few weeks. We hope to get all the problems of our robot worked out so we can perform very well at Qualifiers.
Written By: Abhijit Bhattaru