WMRI comes to a close

Yesterday was the West Michigan Regional Invitational, hosted by four local FIRST Robotics Competition teams. Please take a minute and read some of my recent posts that describe in more detail the WMRI .

I got over to Grandville High School at about 7:45am on Saturday to get things rolling for the event. The opening ceremonies started shortly after 8am, featuring the Creston High School Jr ROTC color guard. After a few announcements, things got under way. It all started a little late, but things got back on schedule relatively quick.

Our team (904) was in the first match of the day. Our autonomous mode was doing goofy things, but we ended up winning our first match. We fired up the computer and made some quick changes to the autonomous mode code and had it working fairly well over the next couple matches.

After our first win, we lost a couple matches in a row and then scored a tie by mid-morning. I'm not sure what our record ended up being by the time we broke for lunch, but we were well below .500. It really didn't matter a lot to us, since we were not putting any pressure on ourselves to win, and we were letting any student drive the robot that wanted to. Every match we had someone different driving the robot, and that was the most fun; to see kids really getting excited about being more of a part of the team.

We broke for lunch at about 11:30 and had a couple slices of pizza. After we finished eating we discovered several of our wires that connect our sensors to the robot controller had pulled out. We hurried and carefully reconnected the wires in the proper spot, but that was the first little bit of pressure we had for the day. It got a little worse towards the end.

So, we finished up qualification matches; all the students were having a great time and I assumed that all teams would move into the elimination rounds since there were only 19 teams. Typically they take the top 8 teams, and let them pick 2 additional alliance partners to begin competing in the quarter final rounds. I wasn't worried since the top 24 teams would advance.

Then, the shocker... Since this was a smaller event, they decided to take only the top 4 teams which meant only 12 teams would compete in eliminations and the day would be over for the other 7. At the end of qualifications we were ranked 16th out of 19. Yikes!

Alliance selections began and with the top 4 teams. The top ranked team was from Swartz Creek MI, and they picked a team from Flint MI as their first alliance partner. They continued on with the next 2 teams and the fourth ranked team was a new team that is just getting started. In fact we let them borrow our backup robot so they could get some experience before the 2009 season started. I had my fingers crossed that they would pick us as one of their partners, but they had other plans. They picked two other teams, that were certainly good choices. Finally, the last selection would be made by the top rated alliance and they selected us! Whoo Hooo!! We made it into the big dance!

The top 4 alliances immediately began talking strategy and charging batteries. The semi-final rounds were scheduled and we were to be in the first match. The announcer called for our team and we began the march to the field. At that very moment I was told that one of our alliance partners wanted us to put a 3 second wait into our autonomous code. This would cause our robot to wait 3 seconds after the match started, giving our partner a better opportunity to knock a track ball off in autonomous mode which would give us 12 extra points. I grabbed my computer and we took off towards the field. I made the changes to the code as we walked out into the gym where the competition was taking place. With the computer connected to the robot, we tried downloading the new code, but were getting all kinds of errors. Little did I know that I made an error in the code and it prevented us from downloading the updates. The event officials told us we'd have to wait to solve our problems because that match had to start right then.

The first semi-final match started and our autonomous mode worked fine, even though we did take off immediately when it started. We won that match easily and with a little more time, we saw the coding error and made the necessary changes. We downloaded the updated code and our second semi-final match went in our favor again.

Now, with the coding changes behind us; our alliance partners were happy with us not getting in their way at the start, I thought we were in good shape. Little did we know that our sensor cables began to work their way out again. So, back into panic mode we fired up the computer to show us where the each sensor cable was supposed to be connected. We had plenty of time to work out those problems and were ready for our first final round match.

In the finals, we won the first match in a very close race. However, in the second match we weren't so lucky, losing in a close fight. This set us up for a 3rd tie-breaking race. In the final match we were out-played, but I saw the official issue 3 penalties to the blue alliance (we were red), which would have made the outcome very close. In the end they issued the 3 penalties to our alliance, and that gave our opponents the win. After looking at the score, even if the 3 penalties had been given to the proper alliance, we still would have lost, but it would have been very very close.

It really didn't matter, our team was very happy to have won second place, and to top it off, we were awarded the Gracious Professionalism award for letting the new team borrow our back-up robot. They also mentioned that Team 904 is always eager to help out in events like the WMRI, and I am very proud to be associated with this good group of students, teachers, engineers and parents.

Team 904 is looking forward to 2009, and I think we will be a force to be reckoned with this season.