On Monday, the team made significant progress in assembling key parts of the robot. With our new designs coming together, we focused on refining vision alignment by retesting the angle and direction of the camera for auto on the old robot, ensuring it properly detected AprilTags for more precise movement. Meanwhile, our driver continued practicing, further improving his skills to maximize our robot’s performance on the field. The control systems team worked on crimping the e-chain. Additionally, we finished assembling our third elevator of the season.
We also had many students in the classroom building spare subsystems for Vantage and disassembling subsystems from the older iteration for spare parts. They labeled them and packed them into our pit and trailer. At the end of the day, we finished wiring and tested the new coral and algae scoring mechanism on our field, running a few cycles to check for reliability. We also worked on organizing the pit, making sure everything had a designated spot to make setup easier at competition.
We checked our packing list multiple times to ensure we had all necessary tools and backup parts. Once everything was prepared, we loaded up our trailer and sent it off to the competition. We also posted our robot teaser, which was exciting to finally share after all the work that went into Vantage. There will be a more detailed one coming out at the end of the season, so stay tuned for that!
On Saturday, a select group of 25 students drove out to Sacramento for practice day, where we set up our pits and hospitality station to prepare to win the Sacramento Regional! We made sure everything was in order and ran through final checks to ensure a smooth start to the competition. Our scouters got to work right away, gathering data on other teams and forming inter-team connections. Meanwhile, our pit crew attempted to get our robot on the field twice, but we ran into serious issues with belt wear and CAN errors that refused to go away no matter how much we scrambled to fix them. It was frustrating, but we kept pushing through and doing everything we could to get things working. At the end of the day, we had a team meeting in the hotel lobby, like we did every night, where we went over our game plan and what we needed to improve. Even with the setbacks, we stayed optimistic and focused on making the best of the situation.
Sunday started with the same CAN issues, and as a result, our ranking took a hit. We lost a lot of matches due to reliability problems, which wasn’t exactly the best feeling, but even with the struggles, teams were impressed with our design and the fact that when we worked, we could score all the points in ReefScape. The problem was just making sure we actually worked. We won one of our four matches, and despite everything, we still got picked by C-Tech Titans and Deus Ex Machina to be part of
Alliance 8 for playoffs. We didn’t make it far, but it was exciting to get the chance to compete in eliminations. We also won the Industrial Design Award for the second year in a row, which was a huge accomplishment and made the weekend feel a little less rough.
After the competition, we went to a tiny taqueria, and it was absolutly amazing(and a bit chaotic). 25 adrenaline-fueled teenagers packed into a small restaurant, hyped up from the weekend and starving after a long day. The food was amazing, and we had the best time just hanging out and unwinding.
Once we got back to the hotel, we had one last team meeting in the lobby, then got some much-needed rest. The best part of the trip? Skipping school on Monday since we were still driving home. Even though we didn’t do as well as we hoped, we learned a lot, had a great time, and we’re already making plans to improve before our next competition—including dedicated “break-in time,” where we’re just going to ram our robot into everything we can think of to test durability.
Sacramento was definitely a wild ride, but we’re coming back stronger next time.
