Posted: A First Hand View of The Happenings in the Pit
These last two days at regionals have gone anything but smooth. Murphy’s law has definitely been in full effect. The worst enemy of all was not our robot, super glue, or the code, it was most definitely TIME.
/*|*\Thursday/*|*\
This was when we knew that we had a lot of work to do. So many things in such a small amount of time. The bumpers wreaked such havoc in the robot; they took multiple hours to complete and they barely ended up sliding by inspection. It took up so much valuable time that no one could expect we would need so much later.
Besides this, we did not even get the robot controls into the robot until 1:20 PM! This is a very scary thought because the robot had basically never been tested for driving or any controls before. That was something this build season did not allow, just not enough time.
After working on the controls for awhile and finishing the wiring, it was about 7pm and we were one of the only teams not inspected yet. After just barely fitting into the size constraints and weighing in at 119.9 pounds, 0.2 pounds away from being overweight, I felt good. The most difficult things (so I thought) had passed and were out of the way. Boy was I wrong, the nightmare had only just begun.
After an inspection of some simple problems such as the Bill of Materials and the camera ground, and some not so easy ones like the bumpers and the trailer hitch, we worked as hard as we could to get what needed to be finished. We worked up until they were basically removing the tools from our hands and pushing us out the doors, but it was not done. Our team needed more time.
We left the pit that night knowing we still had so much to do. It did not really feel like we had gotten anywhere and it seemed like only a horrendous mess of problems awaited us the next day. But we kept our spirits high (the best we could at least) and I left that arena thinking “How are we going to do this tomorrow?” Alas, if only there was more time.
/*|*\Friday/*|*\
A blur of motion is all I can really describe for our pit this morning. Fingers were flying everywhere trying to fix conveyor belts, re-do pulleys, attach the trailor hitch, and still try to test the robot. Our inspector sat at our station the entire time watching us, waiting. Finally after the last calls for our match were up, we sprinted out of there with a robot that had never been driven before, a robot never tested, but finally we had something. Other teams stared oddly at us in the stands when they cheered just because the robot was on the cart moving towards the field. I, being the coach, was at ground level with the control panel while Jared and Greg manned controls and Jake was our payload specialist. Our first match had finally begun.
Needless to say, this match ended as many would the rest of that day, in an utter defeat. Following this was several code changes, a lot of help from the NI experts, and some pretty irritable teammates. Yes, I admit, I was getting pretty annoyed. Putting so much into a robot, into a team and not finding success is very hard to deal with. Constant challenges continued to arise, and when one was solved, another popped up. The perpetual list of problems continued throughout the day, which bogged down many team member’s spirits, especially those very close to the robot.
We still had some bugs in the code to work out so we went back to the practice field to work on them. Suddenly, the front right wheel stopped working. After going through some code, we discovered that the encoder had completely stopped working. I went to the front to look and I was flabbergasted by what I saw. The encoder had been worked off by the shaft (the shaft worked its way out of the wheel), a problem we thought we had solved earlier. Fixing this did not matter anymore though, because the encoder was completely dead. Our entire code was out the window. Everything we had worked on this season was gone, useless without four encoders. JD quickly changed the program so that now we were only telling the robot what to do and not getting feedback. This made the job of the drivers a lot harder, but we had no choice at that point.
But finally the light at the end of that tunnel could barely, oh just barely, be seen. We could see there were still many obstacles in our way, but I knew that somehow we would be able to do this. A miraculous event then did occur. After skipping one match and losing two others, we finally had a success. Being paired with an awesome alliance and the robot functioning decently, we were able to pin opponents and even score with our robot. Our amazing payload specialist was also very successful.
After replacing a bad jaguar motor controller for the shooter, we thought we were in pretty good shape for the last round and realized wow, if we would have been in this spot when we walked in here this morning, think of how much better a place we would be in. How many more matches we could have won. One day, one day! For a second I just thought back to the season, wow if we could have only added just one more Saturday in there to make this work! Then again, what we accomplish in one day is probably the same as what we would accomplish in one week in the shop. Time was our problem. But at this point, nothing could be done.
A very close fifth and final match, ending in a loss by only two points, is hard enough to deal with. What made it harder was that we were lined up to shoot five balls into the opponent’s trailer for almost half of the match when the top conveyor flubbed. One ball got stuck at the top, something that we never really even had seen as a problem before hand, and held back the ten points we really could have gotten.
At the end of the day, there were a massive amount of “coulda, woulda, shoulda, didn’ts going around. We still have to redo the bumpers if we want to have any chance of passing inspection at nationals and several other things still must be fixed before we pack the robot to be shipped to Atlanta.
Our only hopes for making it to the finals at this point, are if one of the top eight teams deems us worthy to compete on their alliance.
Time has been our biggest enemy during this competition, and probably will continue to play a very significant role.
Now I am at home, and most of the team is at the Team Social at MSOE. As I write this, I am very thankful for all the support we have received during the season and the regional.
Stay tuned for the final post from your faithful reporter, Sam Scharles, from the Pit. Until tomorrow!
Mukwonago B.E.A.R.s Team Moto:
Make it work!
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