December 2nd: Mechanical M-Ayhem Competition

Today was great!

I slept at 1AM and I woke up at 5AM to help out with the Robotics Team complete the robot in time for Mechanical M-Ayhem. When I got there at 6AM, there were already some people preparing for competition. The public relations team was preparing pins. I got to work pumping balls so we could test our kicking mechanism. The business management team helped with attendance.

Both of the gears we were 3D printing last night failed, but luckily the gear we were making for the kicker mechanism came out well. At the time we didn't know what we were going to do for our drive system.

As it turns out, the battery mount that the electrical team was working on yesterday blocked where the motor was going to be placed, so they had to take part of it off. The engineering team continued to create the kicker mechanism, while the electrical team found the appropriate motors for the wheels.

After a bit of research, it was discovered that we never purchased the rod for the motor, which was needed by the gearbox we were using for the kicker mechanism, which meant that we could only do defense or a not-so-good offense.

Anyways, at this time it was getting close to our departure time, 8AM, so we had to rush to pack everything into the vans.

We arrived at Team 766 (host)'s school, Menlo Atherton a little late, but at least we still made it.

The new members got to work setting up our pit table, while the other veteran members and I checked in with the organizers to learn about refereeing. The lead manager of 766, Hunter, was wearing one of our wristbands, which was cool.

The first match happened around 10:15, and we were supposed to be in the match. Unfortunately, our robot wasn't complete. Refereeing was alright, I had to get a refresher of the rules though.

Anyways, the new members continued to work through the robot. We had to borrow a lot of parts for our drive system from other teams, and we never could get the kicker mechanism working. Fortunately, we managed to get it working for our last qualification match. Unfortunately, the drive base code wasn't functional, because the one programming it didn't get the memo about the parameters, and how it lied about the parameters on the C++ docs. Luckily, all of the teams made it into the finals matches, and we were picked into an alliance.

After fixing the parameters for the drive base code, the wheels still acted weirdly, but it was already too late, but at least we could go forwards and backwards fine! Unfortunately, we lost our first finals match.

Although there were many errors and misfortunes throughout the season for creating the robot for Mechanical M-Ayhem, we managed to get the robot working, and we learned a lot throughout the creation process!

We finally arrived back to our campus around 7 and finished cleaning up at 7:30.

Also, thanks to all of the organizers of Mechanical M-Ayhem, Team 766, The M-A Bears for organizing Mechanical M-Ayhem and inviting us!

Thanks for reading,
Issac