Center Grove Competition notes - 16 Dec 2017

The 2017 Center Grove FTC Robotics competition is now history.  It was a very peculiar competition for us, as we didn’t have any hard mechanical faults nor any software “what the what!?” moments.   We also didn’t have a team make it into the finals and didn’t bring home any hardware although one team was a finalist in the “Controls” award and the other nominated for the “Rockwell Collins” award.

So …

What went right.
A whole lot of stuff actually.
1) This is the first competition I recall where we didn't need to do open heart surgery on at least one 'bot during the day.  There have been times when we've barely made it to the queue in time.
2) Also, the drivers and coaches did outstanding work today.  Really appreciate the maturity and overall ownership these students are displaying.  That's the sort of thing that makes it easy to keep coming back as a mentor.
3) I think our new approach to making code has legs.  We’re pretty close to something that is generally extensible into future seasons regardless of what those robots look like.  Further, we have the potential to do two teams with a grand total of maybe 2k lines of our own code, which really comes down to 4x500 (autonomous and driver, Juden Ki and Kernel Panic). 

Simplifying this stuff while adding functionality isn’t easy, but it’s satisfying as [expletive redacted].  So naturally there’s some more simplifying I want to try.  We’ll see how that works out.  There's lots of other stuff I want to try outside of robotics too.

Mechanically, I feel there are a couple of things we need to re-think.  These robots stayed bolted together OK, but we need to figure out how to score more points faster and repeatably … by like a factor of 4. 

Speaking of which, we have on order some Mechanum wheels ( https://www.andymark.com/PhotoDetails.asp?ShowDESC=N&ProductCode=am-3026L  ) which will allow our robots to move sideways like a crab.  This means there’s some rebuilding on the hardware side … AND, some brand new software as well.  

… and since we’re talking about software again, I created some issues on JK’s GitHub.  See them here:
https://github.com/judenkirobotics/columbusFTC_app_baseline-JudenKi/issues
One issue is about adding logic to support violent crabbing.  Hmmm… “Violent Crabs” sounds like maybe a Cajun Ska band …

We’ll have a competition debrief at this Wednesday’s practice.  I’m confident a couple of us will be doing some work between Christmas and New Year’s Day.