West Michigan Regional - Practice Day

The first thing I found out this morning is that GVSU has wifi access (since it's a college), and I thought, perfect, I can blog on my laptop while I'm in the pits. Good concept, but it didn't really work out. You see, I tend to go where ever the robot is. If it's in the pits, I'm there too. If it's on the practice field, me too; and if it's on the field, well I'm hollering like a blithering idiot in the stands. The down side is that when we're in the pits, there's about enough room for the robot and maybe two people, at most. Blog time never really presented itself, and I didn't want to be hogging pit space to write.

Nevertheless, here's a quick update of Team 904 on Practice Day in West Michigan. We were scheduled for 3 practice rounds. Each round consists of two consecutive matches. The first round wasn't bad but wasn't great either. The officials were not keeping score at first. There were scores, but they were incorrect. They were also not judging and awarding penalties. By (incorrect) score, we lost the first two rounds of matches. I think some may have been close had the scoring been correct and properly judged.

In our third round we were paired up with the new team from Grand Blanc Michigan 2337 - the Enginerds. They've been getting a lot of good press online over the last week or so and they have a great robot. They have an elegant "shooter" and we were using our fork lift. Together we scored 104 points and Team 904 placed the ball on the overpass, but as the match ended we were barely touching the ball, which did not score us the 12 point bonus. Either way, we smoked the opposing alliance. It was certainly the high point of the day.

Tomorrow we are pulling out all the stops in our hybrid mode. We were able to get our IR board re-flashed (cleaned, cleared and restored to it's original state) and it seems to be working now. It's time to go for broke. Over the next two days we're going to put our creation to the test. No more, "be careful we might break it". No guts, no glory; we are going for the win.

After dinner practice

We're back for little after dinner practice. These are not matches, just testing on a very small field. I'll post match schedules a little later.

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2 more practice matches

We had 2 more matches that were full field matches (6 robots). We lost both, but they were very close. There will be webcast tomorrow. Check the wisconsin regional website. I'll post a link later.

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Another win

That may have been our last practice match. We won uncontested. Not many teams are practicing.

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904 wins

2nd practice match we win 84 to 20. Next match - right now

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904 wins practice

Our first match was uncontested. We win 40 to 0. We still have lots of problems to fix.

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