Hi! Welcome back to the Iron Claw Blog for the 2025-2026 season! It’s great to see the team back, along with many new members joining our team!
This year, the team decided to attend the Chezy Champ to improve our robot, Vantage, from last season. Learning from prior years, the team concluded that the Chezy Champ would also provide valuable experiences for the first-year students. To prepare for the competition, the team met with 971, Spartan Robotics, to practice on their field. We greatly appreciate the time 971 spent with us, which was really helpful in helping us refine our driving strategies, improve our robot’s performance, and gain valuable insights for the competition!
With great programming work from last season, the programmers utilized their time on testing the code to minimize any possible mistakes in matches. The control system team spent a lot of time on CAN Bus troubleshooting, creating a checklist to improve and guide CAN Bus troubleshooting, testing the robot’s reliability, the team utilized 971’s practice field leading up to Chezy Champs for driver and human player practice, and to troubleshoot problems, so the team could have reliable performances at Chezy. Our human players both practiced to perfect the coral drop from the station and to improve communications and signals with the driver and drive coach. The strategy team split the work of strategy between our two technical program managers, James Smith and Angie Lam. They are both relatively new to strategy, though James was a human player last year and did gain some experience behind the glass. James and Angie hope to be part of the strategy for the next season, but the team will still go through the traditional processes to fairly choose our strategy team.
On Friday afternoon, the team loaded the pits and robot into the trailer and headed to Bellarmine to set up our pits, complete field calibration, and run some practice matches. During the qualification matches, Vantage performed reliably in both auto and teleop. The new drive team also improved the match strategy and execution throughout qualifications. We deeply appreciate the First Alliance Captain 254 and alliance partners 2910, 8033, who selected us for the playoff matches. In the end, our alliance made it to the finals and were the runners up to the alliance 604, 581, 9408, and 841.
We sincerely value 971 for allowing us to practice on the field, and also 254 for hosting Chezy Champs, which turned out to be such a meaningful experience for all teams. Thank you for reading, and we will see you in the next post!
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