Yesterday was interesting. Lansing is about 2.5 hours from Buchanan when the weather is nice. Unfortunately yesterday, the weather was not nice. It wasn't snowing. That we can be grateful for, but it was pouring down rain the entire ride up. There was not a single moment the entire drive where it was not coming down in buckets. This obviously created some issue with visibility and driving in general. About 20 minutes outside of Lansing and a break at the hotel, a piece of plywood blew up from the road and smacked into one of our vans. Fortunately, no one was hurt but the van didn't fair as well. The front grill on the lower section was complete busted and it was necessary to break off a large dangling piece so that we could safety continue to drive. I'm sure the school will not be happy with us, but it was not anyone's fault and everything is OK.
Mason High School in Mason Michigan hosted our competition. It is a rather large school in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately our pit area was much smaller than the 10x10 we should have and there were no dividers between pits. This made for a very cramped work space with us and our neighbors constantly encouching on each others area.
Today we started off and spent quite a while in the number 1 spot of the rankings. That, unfortunately, did not last all day. We hit a streak of bad luck that caused a spiral drop in our rankings and really hurt team moral. As soon as we got up yesterday, we swapped out the motor used to lift the arm assembly. This new motor would raise and lower several times faster than the van door motor we had been using. That meant valuable seconds saved moving the ball down the field. On our third match the screws holding the motor in place broke. We were able to repair it for the next match but that is when things got really ugly. Not only did our repair not hold up, but we took a direct hit to our open arms that busted two teeth off the left side worm gear. We had to remove the new motor entirely and completely dissasemble the open/close assembly to replace the damaged gear. It took us over 30 minutes to complete the repairs and we were not able to play in one of our scheduled matches because of it.
The good news is that we are currently ranked 18 out of 40 and our robot is holding up well with the repairs. Tomorrow is a new day with at least three matches to go before the alliance selection. We are all hopeful and ready to show everyone what we can do.
- Phillip
Mason High School in Mason Michigan hosted our competition. It is a rather large school in what seems to be the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately our pit area was much smaller than the 10x10 we should have and there were no dividers between pits. This made for a very cramped work space with us and our neighbors constantly encouching on each others area.
Today we started off and spent quite a while in the number 1 spot of the rankings. That, unfortunately, did not last all day. We hit a streak of bad luck that caused a spiral drop in our rankings and really hurt team moral. As soon as we got up yesterday, we swapped out the motor used to lift the arm assembly. This new motor would raise and lower several times faster than the van door motor we had been using. That meant valuable seconds saved moving the ball down the field. On our third match the screws holding the motor in place broke. We were able to repair it for the next match but that is when things got really ugly. Not only did our repair not hold up, but we took a direct hit to our open arms that busted two teeth off the left side worm gear. We had to remove the new motor entirely and completely dissasemble the open/close assembly to replace the damaged gear. It took us over 30 minutes to complete the repairs and we were not able to play in one of our scheduled matches because of it.
The good news is that we are currently ranked 18 out of 40 and our robot is holding up well with the repairs. Tomorrow is a new day with at least three matches to go before the alliance selection. We are all hopeful and ready to show everyone what we can do.
- Phillip
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