Saturday (rest of qualifying matches and elimination tournament)
Today we won our only match, thanks in part to our superb ramp, which lifted up the robot on us even though almost all their weight was still on the ramp and not the top of our robot. Then we cleaned up and crated up the robot. Just about everyone stayed to watch the elimination rounds, though we skipped the awards ceremony as more than one of us were coming down with something. If you didn’t come today, you have no idea how much fun you missed! (Picture the mixture of loud music, dancing judges, dancing people in the stands, loud cheering, outrageous outfits, excitement, and—best of all—robots.)

Friday (1st day of qualifying matches)
Today we finished passing inspections, thanks to the help Team 75 gave us with getting the proper version of the firmware for the operator interface. Despite our best efforts, we lost 5 of our 6 matches today, due to a seemingly-endless stream of bad luck (listed in no particular order). In one match, turning too fast ripped the manipulator out of the 80-20 due to the torq. In another match, one of our alliance mates got stuck in opposing alliance’s home zone, costing us the match due to the penalties. In a third match, we lost all power to our robot because we had neglected to re-tighten the terminal blocks. Then there was the match when one of our alliance members did not show up because Ryan and Katherine were not done fixing their safety issues (lack of a pressure switch in the code, no electrical tape insulating their electronics, and relays not affixed in any fashion besides the wires they were connected to).
The only match we won we missed because the robot controller suddenly refused to talk to our computer while we were downloading code, leaving us with no valid code on the RC (ouch!). We have no clue what was wrong, and only managed to get code on there by using Team 75’s computer and cables. Needless to say, we didn’t try to download new code after that!

Thursday (Practice matches)
Today we un-crated the robot and transferred everything to the lighter frame. As this took nearly forever, we made none of our practice matches (though other teams were impressed because it looked like we built our robot in 8 hours—which we nearly did). We also had some “fun” with the plates in the drive gearboxes. (The ones originally shipped by banebots had been discovered by FIRST to be too weak towards the end of the build season. We got the stronger plates at regionals, installed them, and then were told by another team that the pins in the new plates were too short, sometimes causing the gears to fall off. After a bit of reading of ChifDelphi, we ended up replacing the new pins with the old pins on one plate, using the loctite of another team. We may replace the rest once we have our robot back, but we ran out of time at regionals.)
We passed part of inspections today, though we had to lose the extension to the ramps to pass weight and size. (Final weight: 119.6, 0.4 lbs. under the limit!) This was complicated by a brief period of time around 7:45 when the lights went out.

Sorry I did not post this earlier, but regionals is a bit too tiring for me to write blog posts the day of.

Tags: Benji, Chesapeake, Competition, Regionals