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After spending about 10 hours at robot yesterday (the engineers pulled an all nighter), we finally had something that resembled a finished robot. We packed everything up and headed off to Suffield for their annual pre-ship scrimmage.

The robot drove like a dream. The 6-wheel drive makes it easy to drive backwards, and I was pushing robots around left and right. We had some difficulties with the hopper and the launcher, but nothing we can’t fix before ship. At one point, one of the chains on the robot broke, so it was five wheel drive (which for some reason seemed to break the shifting) for the rest of the matches. We didn’t get autonomous working, but I have re-written some code to test at UTC tomorrow that I am fairly confident will work. You see, programming a robot is very difficult to do without the robot, and I have yet to have any one-on-one time.

Woodie Flowers was at the scrimmage, and Chris and I and a few other people from our team got to talk with him, which was very cool. I talked to him a little bit about Olin College as well, and it was interesting to hear what he thought about it. He said he didn’t think it was revolutionary enough; but it certainly isn’t like most other schools. I’m quite excited to head up there next weekend.

For those of you keeping score at home, we were the first seed in the qualifying matches at the scrimmage and were the second place alliance overall. Props to 195 and 230, they had awesome bots, and without all of the difficulties we ran into we would have been able to pull it off. The good thing is: now we won’t have the same difficulties at the real competitions!