HellOOOO, Austin!
A few weeks ago, we visited our very first district event for this game in Waco, Texas. Although it did not end how we hoped, it allowed us so much time to troubleshoot our robot and give our driver hands-on experience on the field. We got to work out kinks, work out the kinks that came up after working out the first kinks, and worked out the kinks that we did not think were going to be kinks. We also had the opportunity to test out all our new cheers and swag to get the team hyped up, like our team’s brand-new team number signs and our newest member of the CAN-fam, Baby CAN. Overall, this experience gave us the opportunity to fix issues before they became a major problem in our next district event and/or states.
People (from left to right): Team 2158, Baby CAN
After the field had been set up and the practice games began, we got the chance to test our robot on an official game field for the first time. Right off the bat, we noticed that our autonomous programming was often getting stuck as our arm pulled up to put our pre-loaded game piece on the highest pole. Instead of moving upwards then retracting, the robot would simply move back to its original position, impaling the intake on the bar. This would make it so that we were unable to pull back, sticking us in a limbo of just hoping that our alliance partners could pull through. The pit crew (mechanics from our team prepared to repair our robot) tried relentlessly to fix this issue, but no matter what we tried, we still got stuck. This left our team with a nervous feeling in our stomach as the qualification games began, which actually determine if we are able to make it to the playoffs.
Unfortunately, the issue still pervaded us, making our first few games which should have been easy wins into tough losses. This damaged our rank sorely, as we fell to the mid-30s. However, by some miracle, we finally got it working and began to repair the damage the bug had caused. We were able to climb to rank 27 before qualifications ended, which certainly wasn’t good, but it wasn’t the worse in the event. Luckily, though, during alliance selection, we were picked by alliance 7 as their first choice. This at least gave us a chance, even if our first match was extremely hard to go against.
As expected, our first match against alliance 2 was a loss. Their robots were simply more adept at scoring quickly and reliably compared to our alliance, so we were unable to match up to their power. After that round, we moved to the loser’s bracket, where we were put up against alliance 6, who had also lost the previous round. Luckily, we overcame the challenge and moved on without being eliminated. Unfortunately, however, our next match was against the two most powerful robots at the event: alliance 5. Their speed and agility overcame our capabilities and they won against us. As that was our second time being defeated, that meant we were out of the competition.
Although we only made it to semifinals, this experience gave us a chance to see our robot perform with other teams for the first time, as well as giving our driver vital experience that would assist us in future events (no spoilers, but spoilers!) It was a learning experience for members both rookie and veteran, as rookies learned the general structure of competition and veterans got back into the jive of participating in events. We also got to see a bunch of unique, different robot designs with elements and strategies we had never thought of that made us shift the way we approach the game as a whole.
Overall, our first district event gave us the chance to form our own expectations of competition, as well as see how we held up in the fire of competition. And although the hot steel of our team burned, we’re ready to be quenched and come back stronger than ever.
