Yeah, I know. I SAID I would be posting more. Yep, that didn’t go as planned. But then again, the “plan” got thrown out a while ago and ended us up where I never thought we would go this year.
Ok, before you say “you don’t have any faith in your team”, let me explain.
At the time of this writing, it is my 19th year as a mentor in FIRST. In that time, my teams have been to finals twice but never won. Some robots have been better than others, and some of the best still lost out in the playoffs, sometimes without even being picked to be in the playoffs. So going into competition this year, I think it was understandable that I was far from expecting what happened. Admittedly, the 2024 is one of the best robots I have been a part of making and the 2024 team is one of the best I have had the privilege of mentoring, but still I never thought it would go the way it did.
We had the usual problems, making things fit, redesigning quickly, abandoning ideas for new ones, then abandoning them for even newer ideas. It was a miracle we got it done before the week 1 event we ended up attending. The usual first regional problems arose, lack of practice, lack of tuning, sensor calibrating between matches. Our first few matches were dreadful, but by the end we had worked out most of the problems and were doing pretty good. We weren’t picked, but understandable with such a poor showing at the beginning. No big deal, this is why we do two regionals whenever possible. We went home and fixed what was broken and further refined and tuned the robot.
Then came LA Regional. From the first practice matches, we could already tell this was not going to be a repeat of our first regional. The robot could score at range, run a much better autonomous, and climb every time. When something broke, we replaced it, when it didn’t behave, we recoded it. All through the competition, the attitude in the pit was very different. No mad scrambles to make it work, now it was routine maintenance and wondering when our next match is. This is a rare state for us, no panic building, just ready for more. Of course a couple major breakdowns happened on the field, mostly due to loose or broken wires. We still ran, but it shut down our shooter. Others were getting their hopes up but I had been down that path of disappointment too many times, and I kept my expectations low. So many good robots had gone this way, I expected to, as usual, walk away from alliance selection to have a leisurely lunch and then start packing.
Until… lunch got a whole lot shorter.
I couldn’t believe when “980” was called by the first seed alliance! The top team at the regional wanted us to come help them win. I was in shock, and apparently so was the rest of the team because there wasn’t a sound from anyone for a good 5 seconds. After coming out of the shocked silence and more than the appropriate amount of screaming, the entire pit crew ra- I mean walked very carefully back to the pits and our robot to begin maintenance again. Immediately, we were in trouble. One of our swerve pods was down. No time to fix, we put on a spare that had been taken off earlier and was not in top shape itself. They almost had to call in a backup but we got it working just in time.
We won that first match, but we weren’t that much help. We took a super hard hit which knocked loose the radio line (we think) disabling us for half the match. We came back on line with enough time to do the endgame climb, but it didn’t work either. After, we found that one of the climbers was bent with no time to repair. The radio wire was replaced along with several other commonly disabling electrical connectors (complete with hot gluing them down that did not sit well with everything my electrical engineering background stood for…) Our driver was given instructions to avoid hits like that again, and to remember that this robot is about speed and evasion, not direct confrontations. He was up to the challenge executing spins as he crossed the field preventing any robot from getting a solid hit on any side and spinning past any defender rolling off them like a wheel. He kept the robot away from attacks and began scoring as fast as he could get across field. We ended up getting one of the highest scores in the regional right before going into finals, not having lost a single playoff match.
Once we got to finals, we knew the team facing us would be tough. They played a lot of defense and drew a lot of fouls from their opponents in the process. Our alliance decided to change tactics. Our shooter was good, but our aiming system was slow so shots took longer than needed. But we were also fast, hard to defend, and has an excellent game piece collector. Rather than shoot what we grabbed, we would shuttle pieces across field to the other two teams so they could use their faster shooters to get even more in and minimize the defense that could be played against them. They could be shooting our piece while we were already running back for another, making our alliance and even quicker scorer than before. Even after winning the first finals match, in the back of my head I couldn’t believe what was happening. I still couldn’t believe when we won the second, finishing on top, winning a regional, something that in 19 years I had never been part of. I didn’t even move right away, I just sat there in the stands with my jaw dropped in disbelief.
So, yeah. We won a regional. My first ever, and the first for the team since 2008. Sorry I wasn’t updating this all throughout the robotics season, but it was for a good cause. Now we have to work out how to get the team to the championships. Those are good problems to have.
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And I PROMISE I will keep all of you updated about how champs goes. Maybe I will even have time to tell you about our preparations. Will do my best
-Alex
Co-Lead Mentor Team 980 Thunderbots