Bag and Tag 2019 - The Final Deadline

For the four years our FIRST Robotics team has been around there has always been a challenging deadline to Build Season.  Six weeks and two days from Kickoff comes "Bag and Tag", the moment at which your competition robot has to be sealed up and on a no touch it status until competition.

Next year Bag and Tag has been eliminated, you just keep building up to competition day.

There are points both ways.  This year when we lost most of Week Four due to weather, and then lost half of the team in Week Six due to a Music Department trip, the new rules would have really helped us out.  Oh well.

We had some of our recently returned musical travelers - very tired of course - back on hand but Bag and Tag was a subdued event this year.  We are planning on having an open house and a bit more celebration of the season in the near future.

One quirk of Bag and Tag is that you can keep up to 30 pounds of mechanisms out for improvement and add them back in at competition.  What to keep out is a dangerous decision.  You must get everything back on and working in a few hours to get practice matches the day before real competition begins.  We've been burned in the past by finding this process to be far more difficult than it was expected to be.

I don't know how this all ends up.  Will this ridiculously complicated robot astonish the competitive field in five weeks through its competence or through its Goldbergian excesses?

We won't know for a while but after a few days to catch our breath and let the rest of the team make it back to town we will configure our practice drive base into the full competition version and start driving and coding frantically.

The home stretch as it played out.

T-minus 48 hours:

We are now devoting as much or more attention to the "B-machine".  We have to bag the competition machine but have made a near identical clone with which we can continue software development and programming.  Of course the manipulator arm and control box need to be transplanted, but here we have Beta getting ready for action.

T-minus 24 hours:

Both robots are getting their loose wires swaddled in flexible cable covers to reduce the chances of being jostled and grabbed.

Another late innovation:  We want to be able to pick up balls on the fly.  Our robot has a cut out in the front where our vacuum manipulator rests.  Well, why not put a ball catcher in there?  At slow speeds you can corral the ball and bring the vacuum cup down while still moving!  Both A and B machines now have this on board.  Sometimes the one ounce, simple features do more for you than the complicated, heavy parts.

Zero Hour:  A busy night, lots of fussy little details to attend to.  I only took a few pictures and they were unremarkable.  Everyone was tired.  The robot went into its plastic cocoon to the music of Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" played on somebody's phone.

I understand there is another blizzard coming in the morning.  With the team now taking a few much deserved days off I say, bring it on.  The weather can't do much more to us at this point....