March 19th, 2023: FRC San Francisco Regional 2023, Day 3

Today was pretty tiring, since we've been competing for the last 2 days, but it was quite rewarding.

We only had 2 more qualification matches today. For our first match of the day (ninth in total), our programmers were trying to finish coding our gripper mechanism, but because we were testing at the pit, they disabled the drivetrain code, so we couldn't move at all in teleop. One of our other alliance members were also have mechanical issues with their drivetrain, so they didn't come onto the field at all. Although we were a bit of a deadweight to the match, our other alliance member, FRC 5924, managed to push us up onto the charge station, so we were able to score a few more points.

After that match, our programmers managed to finish programming our gripper mechanism for our final match. We also installed a USB camera onto our robot, which was absent from our earlier matches so far, but while I was reviewing the code, I saw that the camera code was commented out, so I was in a bit of a rush to get our USB cable to tether it and deploy the fixed code. Anyways, for our final match of the day (tenth match in total), we were able to utilize our gripper mechanism and score a few points. Throughout the matches, I was the human player, but since we had nothing to intake, I didn't really do much apart from assisting the other teams, but for the final match, I'm pretty glad that I was able to help score a few points. We came up with a variety of hand signals to communicate about the state of game pieces and the robot with the gripper, since we couldn't find the encoder for our redline motor, so we couldn't prevent it from going down to far. The hand signals were used to prevent the robot from touching the ground with bare robot exposed to it and moving, since that was against the rules.

Anyways, we scored 25th overall, with 42 teams in the total competition. However, team rank doesn't matter. In the Awards Ceremony, we managed to with the TEAM SPIRIT AWARD!!! I was overjoyed when we won it. Last year we won the Judges' Award. This year, we won the Team Spirit Award. In the end, what matters is what we accomplished. With many issues with supply, we were left with building on the last two weeks of competition, so with a small working manipulation system, as a team, we're still pretty proud.

Thanks for reading,
Issac