April 5th: East Bay Regional (Day 1)

Today was not bad.

Today was the first day of practice matches for the East Bay Regional. This regional has a lot of teams, 60 teams to be exact, and many of them are really high performing.

Fortunately, I woke up earlier today so I made it on time, but I can only hope that I make it on time tomorrow. I'll try to make a bunch of alarms again.

When we finally arrived we stood in the cold for a while before we were able to put our belongings in the pits. Afterwards, the drivers attended the driver's meeting, and we calibrated our cameras on the field. Unfortunately, when we were testing the lifters, the metal motor bracket broke. When we got back to the pits, fortunately someone noticed the issue, and the engineering team brought the bracket to the machine shop. They actually got it fixed! They said they just pressed the metal until it was flat, which was really surprising to me. I thought it was a little funny, how they were able to fix it by just pressing it hard enough.

My brother also dropped by and saw the competition.

Then, we were able to make our first ever practice match, ever, since the team restarted!!! It was very exciting. We were able to score 4 notes! That's a lot of notes compared to the San Francisco Regional! That's pretty good! And we didn't even have any fancy code!

Afterwards, we finished getting inspected. Unfortunately, we had to miss our second scheduled practice match. However, despite some long delays, we finally passed inspection after some complications. We barely, and I mean barely passed inspection, but we still passed it, technically, first try!

Anyways, afterwards, the programming team did some testing for our automatic note aiming code, but it didn't move for some reason even though we just changed a couple lines of code, which we hopefully can fix tomorrow.

At this time the engineering team was still working on the lifters, but we still went to our scheduled practice match. For some reason a lot of our motors were just not working, which was alarming. After the match, and after some inspection we realized, that for some reason, the can bus wire was ripped apart. Fortunately, the Citrus Circuts 1678 had a spare can bus wire for the spark max, which we were able to utilize.

After that we got the lifters back onto the robot, then we went to the practice field to test. Fortunately, they worked, but unfortunately, we were unable to do any more testing since it was getting late.

Hopefully we do well tomorrow despite today's troubles! I'm also hoping that the programming team can get the automatic note detection code working and the primitive field centric driving working, as that will help lower our cycle times drastically. 

Thanks for reading,
Issac