By |2023-03-27T20:38:23-07:00April 11th, 2022|

We played in our final competition, Silicon Valley Regional, last weekend. Going into SVR, one of FIRST’s most competitive regional competitions, many of us were unsure how we would rank and if we would qualify for worlds. But through our persistence and hard work, we performed much better than we expected. The SVR grind began two weeks earlier, right after we competed in the Monterey Bay Regional. Our performance was extraordinary compared to previous years and we ranked 4th at the end of the qualification matches. We only needed some minor changes to our climb before we focused on improving our cargo mechanism and decreasing cycle times. The weekend before SVR began with a rapid round of prototyping to modify the geometry of the claw. The side plates that held on the shooter wheels would hit away cargo and made it difficult to reliably intake cargo, even with a ball chasing program. As a result, we modified our side plates to include slight cutouts that increased our acquisition zone significantly. In addition, our limelight, which was mounted directly on the claw, got damaged at MBR so we refashioned a new mount that protected it from impact. .        Once the cargo fixes were done, the robot was handed off to the programmers so they could finish [...]