We had a successful Week 2 Silicon Valley District event. Our robot was reliable, robust, and capable of handling heavy defense, and our shoot-on-the-move (SOTM) capabilities helped us rank 4th after quals. As Alliance Captain 3, we selected Teams 5026 Iron Panthers, 1351 TKO, and 5499 Bearium, and we thank them for being great partners in the playoffs. We were honored to receive the Quality Award sponsored by Apple. Thank you to Team 100 Wildhats for hosting and to all the FIRST volunteers who helped support the event. We are proud of the team’s performance and progress this season, and look forward to competing in the Week 5 East Bay District event.
With the next competition being at Berkeley in Week 5, we had a lot to work on. We decided to fix the damage to Valance and give our team driver some driver practice to improve his skills. After his practice, we decided to improve our Autos and implement new code into the robot, like a turret hood-down feature for under the trench, and we also reworked our intake kicker bar so that it intakes quicker and that there is a lower likelihood of jamming it on a ball.
We also chose to look for a new way to make our turret have a larger degree of its ability, and also a way for it not to snap and break so easily. We had our machining team work hard on making these pieces for the turret and for our spare. The CADders also managed to redesign our stack for faster ball output, and we were able to put more slack on the net that holds the balls in so that it won’t jam as much as before.
Our spindexer has a redesigned dyerotor, making it shorter, and we added ramps inside the frame to prevent further ball jams. We also decided to remove the climb, as there wasn’t much use for it for us, and it helps us focus on being a shooting bot with high accuracy.
You can continue to track our build season progress at our website’s photo album.
