Tournament Time 2019 Day Two

When you walk around the pits at a FIRST robotics event you tend to see a lot of similar looking machines.  Oh, in a way this is necessary, all are built with the same restrictions and to do the same tasks.  But still, there is less variety than you'd expect.  Teams tend to study and copy the successful work of other teams, and there are just certain ways to do things that are more efficient.  You want to pick things up?  Some kind of wheeled intake looks to be the most efficient way to do it.

It is rather like walking around in a suburban parking lot and seeing many vehicles that differ only in color and minor details.  Then you come across something strange, perhaps an exotic Italian or British sports car.

Well our team built the equivalent of a Masserati or a Triumph TR-6.  Our vacuum based design is hard to build, harder to build such that it will be a success.

It's probably fun to own an exotic sports car.  But you have to be exacting in your maintenance.  Otherwise it spends as much time in the shop going zero MPH as it does on the highway doing 120.  

This is a roundabout way of saying that while our robot has gotten a lot of interest and many compliments, it is one that has to be watched like a hawk for the latest unforeseen issue that will put it in the shop.  We've had hardware, software and communications glitches.  We bent a pneumatic cylinder and misaligned our vision tracking system.  We figured out that a 10 millisecond communication code hiccup was making us drop things as power to the vacuum motor dropped.  We busted one of our custom wheels trying to do something in haste.  It has not been an easy day.

Our record is currently 3 - 4 with two more matches tomorrow.  Just a couple pics of the day:

There are two teams from China and one from Turkey in attendance.  At the beginning of the day there is a program where among other things the National Anthem of participating teams are sung.  That of China is rather melodic, but one suspects is mostly about tractors.  That of Turkey is a bit eerie.  As is their flag which had on it an image  of a guy in a Fez.  I figure it is Kemal Attaturk.

If you are mad enough to own an exotic sports car you will at least have the admiration of the similarly minded.  Like robotics judges.  We have had a lot of them through today, mostly asking questions about our interesting vacuum system, how it was designed, what problems we encountered ( plenty to say there ).  We are winding up an interesting year, one in which a very ambitious project was attempted and from which much has been learned.  Generally in that most estimable fashion known as The Hard Way.

Robot at rest in the pit.  Back to it in the morning.