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The robotics scrimmage was today. Pictures are here. Video will be coming.

Kim and Prague and Melough and I got there bright and early to get driven to Suffield so we could actually do things instead of being classified as ’spectators’. Kim and Melough are base and arm drivers respectively; Prague is our human player; and I am lead camera guy / backup human player.

A lot of teams were there, and Suffield has a really nice high school. We set all our gear up and we got the camera working again, only we’re not a hundred percent sure of the information it is giving us back because of our new camera mount that hasn’t been tested really well (read: at all). That’s for tomorrow to fix.

The first practice round we did pretty good, and managed to cap two goals and almost three. The second round, we picked up two tetras from the automated loading zones, but when we got a third we got caught on the loading station and pulled ourselves over. It was not good. The third round we were going to hook up the dashboard (read: information recorder) to get some information back to debug the camera. However, the laptop the dashboard was on wouldn’t turn on, so I was just a human player. One of our alliance partner’s (read: the game is 3v3) human player asked me if we intended to use our human player: nope. She grabbed a tetra and got ready to dash, and I just stood there trying to see if the camera was working. Unfortunantly, the field was wired incorrectly and when she got off her pad, all the alliances robots turned off, instead of just hers (read: safety pressure mats so robot doesn’t hit you when you’re loading tetras on it manually while it is in the manual loading zone). This made our arm fall, which caught a tetra on the loading station, and we fell over again.

The rest of the matches went much more swimmingly, and while we were unable to get any useful dashboard info (we’re still working on decoding it), we were able to drive around and not fall over. Melough and Kim did an incredible job at driving. Team 230 had an insane robot that capped massive numbers of tetras (but maybe false started from the loading stations a little) and Melough and Kim managed to knock the tetras it carried on it off like three or four times between the normal rounds, the semis and the finals.

We were seeded sixth, but lost the coin flip to 230. We were picked by robot 88 for their alliance, so we were on to the semis.

The finals had us lose the first match 1 point to 0 points, because of penalties. The second match was much more intense, and due to some incredible defense by team 38 and some nice capping by 88 and ourselves, we won with two rows (read: goals are arranged like tic tac toe, cap three in a row for bonus ten points) and were all behind the line at the end of the first round (read: ten more bonus points), we won by a margin of thirty points. The third round was really intense, especially because they started to play defense against us. Luckily, our arm is rediculously long and was able to reach right over them and cap tetras.

It was really sweet to win the first robotics event I’ve ever gone too, even if it wasn’t official. We got a lot of experience for the drivers and found a lot of stuff to improve and fix. We also won a plastic toy tool set for first place.

Tomorrow we have to fix the bot so it doesn’t do a little jig during autonomous, and then we have to debug all our camera location code so we can start to try to cap the vision tetra. Once Betts has configured the potentiometers we’ll be able to use the arm in autonomous and hopefully be able to configure it to do something useful by the end of the day.

Monday I’m going skiing at The Common Man Inn like I did last February break. Only caveat: they got rid of the indoor/outdoor pool. All indoors now.