Last weekend, our team competed in the Central Valley Regional.
The Wednesday before competition, team 2473, Goldstrikers, used our practice field for testing auto routines and driver practice. We hope that the time they had on our practice field helped strengthen their robot. In the future, we hope to accept more requests from teams who wish to use our practice field.
By Thursday, the Pit was packed in the trailer and our competition team headed to Fresno. During the competition practice day, we encountered an issue with the CANivore and RoboRio. The CANivore failed to communicate with the RoboRio, so the Hardware and Software pit crew ran many tests in hopes of fixing the issue. After swapping out the CANivore did not work, we attempted to swap out the RoboRio instead. Upon noticing that neither change yielded desired results, we replaced the CANivore and RoboRio, restoring communication between the two. We hope to conduct more testing of the two hardware pieces on our test beds. Additionally, during our first practice match, we realized that shooting from a distance no longer worked. This was an unresolved issue that we plan to look into more.
On Saturday, our pit crew got to work, re-tensioning the chains, checking the wires, and replacing the battery. We focused on software, as the issue with shooting from a distance had still not been resolved. Furthermore, the robot drew excessive current from the battery, leading to a RoboRio brownout. Despite the issues we encountered, our 5-piece auto routines worked well. We hope to create more varied and complex auto routines in preparation for East Bay Regional.
By Sunday morning, we were excited to wrap up quals and move on to alliance selection. Qualification matches continued as the day before with the routine check and software diagnosis. On our last qualification match, one of our rollers fell off. Upon closer inspection, we found that the screws were shear on all the rollers and one had fallen out. Despite these drawbacks, we were still ranked 17th after qualification matches, a great accomplishment for our team.
During alliance selection, we were graciously invited by team 3598, SEStematic Eliminators, as their first pick, along with team 3512 Spartatronics in alliance five. Unfortunately, we lost the match against alliance four 60-67 and were sent to the lower bracket. Our second match of the playoffs was exciting because the scores remained tight the whole game; unfortunately, we just barely lost 75-76 partially due to a hardware fault that inhibited us from climbing.
Central Valley Regional was an exciting competition for us, and we are motivated to continue perfecting our Robot, preparing for our final competition before Houston, East Bay Regional.