Our Blog
In an effort to be more connected with our community and our loyal sponsors, we have created a blog to allow anyone interested to keep updated on our activities and the progress that we are making during Build Season, Competition Season, and Off-Season. We attempt to update as much as we can.
To the right of the page is a list of all of our previous blog pages, labeled by season and year. The most recent blog posts will be showcased on this page.
2020 FRC Competition Season Blog
3/9/20
Monday
Posted by
Olivia E.
The Canadian Pacific Regional
Day 4-6: Competition and Returning Home
On Friday, we were met with a myriad of issues as we competed in our matches. In qualification match 4, our intake worked but not our shooter. In match 8, we had similar issues. Finally, in match 17, our third match of the day, we had a majority of our robot working...and then our articulating hood that allowed us to shoot into the outer power port stopped working.
For the following few matches, our hood kept messing up and not working with our lime lite camera. Then finally, we won our first match of the day; qualification match 39, with a score of 69 to 53. Our hood still didn't work as well as we'd hoped, but we kept working and kept trying our best to work through the issues it had, coming up with idea after idea to try to attempt to get it working the way that we wanted it to. Sometimes something worked, and
Robots on the field
sometimes it didn't, but it was a fantastic learning experience for all of our team members to practice perseverance even when solutions weren't working the way that we wanted to. We came up with numerous solutions to attempt to fix each problem and tested all of them, each time eventually figuring out what worked best to solve it.
Our drivers improved as the day went on as well! Our operator, AJ, and our driver, Colby, got better at communication and working closely together as the day went on. With the help of a parent, the drive coach and our two drivers came up with a list of call-back type words that we wanted to use to improve driver communication. For example, whenever the drive coach says something such as "there are balls to your left that you should go for", drivers respond with "copy" to show that they acknowledged the comment. Similarly, with preparing to shoot balls, the driver says, "prep shooter", and the operator responds with "preparing". When the driver is lined up with the port and is ready for balls to begin to be shot, they say, "Shoot" and the operator responds with "shooting". This shift in communication helps the drive team to be able to better convey what is going on to each other in the heat of the moment when it's harder to communicate in long sentences or with explanations of what you are doing.
We continued to have issues with our hood and drive train for the rest of the day, and were very worried when we realized that we were up for the first match the following day. But to our relief, everything on our robot began to work the way that we wanted it to. We won two of our three qualification matches on Saturday, match 56 with a score of 114 to 53, and match 62 with a score of 103 to 77. However, our climbing mechanism still wasn't
Troubleshooting
Despite all of our struggles at the Canadian Pacific Regional, the team was in high spirits as we packed up and headed back to the hotel. We had a good night, playing more bonding games, and thinking about all of the progress we had made. We started the competition with nothing working but our drive train, and finished out the weekend with a fully functioning robot that we were more than proud of.
working how we needed it to, and we all struggled to figure out how to fix it. It almost seemed as though as soon as one problem was fixed, another problem popped up. It wasn't until our very final match, match 69, that everything worked exactly as it was supposed to. We sprinted through the match perfectly, just missing our climb when our alliance partners accidentally pulled the bar out of our reach, and we lost the match 66 to 50.
Our last dinner in Canada
We headed back to California Sunday morning, catching a 7am ferry back to the mainland. The ride was beautiful, and we got to see a part of the sunrise as we made the crossing. After that, it was time to drive all the way back to Seattle to catch our flight home. The border crossing was slightly more bumpy the second time around, and the people driving our trailer were pulled back so that it could be searched before they headed on their way. The caravan of cars containing the people that were flying made fantastic time driving to the airport and, thanks to one of our parent chaperones, we were able to get onto a flight that was two hours earlier that what we had originally intended.
We are very grateful for the opportunity that we had to attend the Canadian Pacific Regional, and are looking forward to attending the San Diego regional this upcoming weekend!
A huge thank you to our parent chaperones and mentors for supporting us throughout this trip! We couldn't have done it without you!
Our final team photo in Canada