Hello all! Welcome back once again. This past Friday, we had our first competition of the season. There is a lot of talk about, so today’s blog post will be formatted differently than previous entries. Furthermore, we would like to announce that, starting today, blog posts will be only released on each Monday, up until the second and final competition, which is on March 24th. Past that point, we will no longer be releasing scheduled blog posts, and instead we will release updates to our post season progress as necessary. With that being said, let’s talk about the competition!
This competition was a great success! We felt we did a lot better than previous years in many aspects, some of which I will detail below. The main “strange occurrence” this year was the arrival of lots of snow, which ended up canceling our second day of competition. In turn, we went several hours later on Friday, and the award ceremony was done virtually.
In our matches, we performed amazingly, and outdid our expectations ten-fold. Compared to last year, field repairs and general robot errors were a lot less common, which was a good sign of our work ethic and build accuracy. Our largest issue was in robot communications; due to a variety of external sources, our ability to control the robot was disrupted, causing us to be unable to move the robot in any way for the rest of the round. This only happened twice, however, we want to address this problem ASAP as it was pretty much our only issue on the robot that occurred during the competition.
One of our biggest accomplishments this year was being awarded the Team Spirit Award, as well as our mentor nominee, Don Delisle, making it to the Finalist round for the Woodie Flowers Award. In terms of team spirit, we were delighted to receive this award, as our team was constantly cheering and showing lots of support, even when our team wasn’t on the field. Part of the reason we won the award was also due to the chariot race we hosted earlier, which gives us a good idea of other ways to interact with our community and win awards in the process. Although winning the team spirit award was a great victory, we were much happier to get Don Delisle to the Finalist round for Woodie Flowers. Don has been a part of our team for longer than many of the current members of the team, and he has always been a vital part of our success each year. This year was no different; his knowledge and experience gave us an incredible advantage and allowed to exceed our expectations in what we could accomplish in the time we were given. For this reason, we are very glad that Don is being recognized for all that he has done for our team across the many years he has been with us.
With all that being said, we are really happy with where we are currently, and how we performed at our first competition. It puts us in a great place to be able to improve in the interim between competitions. On the subject of improvements, we mainly want to address the comms issue that I mentioned earlier, as well as improvements to the robot’s reliability overall, and adjusting the arm’s mechanism to make drive operation easier.
We want to thank you once again for supporting our team. Unfortunately, that is all we have for you this week. We’ll see you next Monday with some more updates on our attempts at improvement! Goodbye, and stay safe!
