Sequoia High School Qualifier
S. Seo
Got out of the house 15 minutes later than expected but still got to the campus on time.
Campus was great. They had a decent track and a football field and an actual pool and a new gym with a bathroom that had more stalls than all the stalls at my school combined.
We were the first to go through inspection (pretty coooooool), so right after that, we went and tested our stuff to see if it was all good. It was. I was setting up my computer at the pits and writing down some stuff during hardware and software inspection, but I dropped by to watch field inspection with the majority of the team. Basically an unscored, single-team match. Autonomous would have worked if it weren’t for the IR not being on (to be honest, I was surprised, because I usually have to do some last minute calibration specific to that playing field), but to be honest, I wanted it to be a secret advantage for us. Tele-op was good. Nelson and his driving, I swear to God. More on that later. And YJ was a good co-driver, and I’m not quite sure how well Jennifer was coaching, but it worked really well, as would be proven later throughout the day.
I was feeling pretty good about stuff. In the meantime, Claire, Nelson, and Jonathan came with me and Coach to test practice. All capabilities fully functional.
We had a pretty early judging session. I think it was 10AM. We got a nice lady to show us the way to our room Waited a bit. Went in. Intro was smooth. Information was smooth. Nelson and I dropped new information, but we did it well, so no big deal. Demo program went a little weird, so I improvised, but Claire tells me that it went pretty well anyway. I think judges liked us. I had a software engineer to appreciate my software genius wootwoot. And the other judge had an amazing accent and it was good. We were in good spirits.
Nelson just kind of dropped this thing on us—it might have been during Q&A, but for some reason, he gave a super detailed explanation of his driving method. This guy and his speedgaming, I swear to God. Apparently he drives thumbs on the joysticks, index fingers on the buttons, and middle/ring fingers on the outside edges to grasp the controller and handle the L/R buttons.
Opening ceremony came around. A little awk because no one stood for the anthem until the chick started to sing. Oops. The master of ceremonies had an amazing announcer voice. It was crazy awesome. I want to be able to speak like that.
Anyway, he announced the first round, and we were in it. I heard our team number and my heart just kind of fell through to the pits. And to make it more intense, we were against Nelson’s buddy’s/Ashley’s brother’s team. It was a huge struggle for coordination because we didn’t know in advance. So we let the other team run autonomous, but they failed. I got pretty upset, but oh well, oh well. We won that round.
We won all of our rounds until the fifth.
Our first match alliance was okay. The other team on our alliance wanted to run their autonomous, saying that it was 100% reliable, but it wasn’t. But we did well in tele-op that first round, because no one was defending us. And we won. And it was a pretty intense match, all things considered. It was the first match of the day, but both alliances broke the 100 point barrier. Crazy.
Second alliance happened to be pretty driven. We were on a time crunch because we only had like two rounds to find and talk to them, but when we did, it was mainly the coach. Actually, it was all the coach. Time crunch was lessened because we had lunch RIGHT before our second match. Anyway, we tried to do something definitely not conventional: double autonomous. We tried, but it kind of messed up. Their robot was too big, crashed into ours, offset both, missed the correct autonomous bucket, crashed into the pendulum, etc. Our robot was offset, so it missed the block. But THANKFULLY it still sensed the IR beacon on the first two buckets (this was some serious luck that it wasn’t the third or fourth), backed up AWAY from the crashed robot, and got stuck somewhere else. I’m glad it was somewhere else, because our robot is really open to getting smashed anywhere and there are some pretty vital pieces open to crashing and just whew. Rather the wall than entanglement with other bots. Anyway, tele-op was aite. I think this is the round where our opponents tried to defend us a little bit, but ended up pinning us for over 5 seconds, thus incurring penalty. After that, they left us alone.
Third match was with the team right next to us in the pits. I went to talk to them a little before the end of lunch, and we sorted out a plan—double autonomous again. After second match didn’t work out (thank God I was paying super close attention and that I was at a good angle to see the problem), I went and notified our alliance about what went wrong. I was afraid the same thing would happen again because their robot was so big, so I was willing to let only one do autonomous and have the other do nothing. But the other team was still insistent on double autonomous, so I left it up to them; just don’t crash into our starting position. If you do, tell us, we won’t run anything. And praise that they had good judgment, because we pulled off double autonomous. And we might have even had complete double autonomous (or the next best), but we were intercepted somewhere, and we couldn’t make it up the ramp. Tele-op was BEAST. Our ally was amazing defense, and they just battled the blocks out of the opponent like it was nobody’s business. Right after, they were super nice and were like, “Yo, just letting you know—you’re first in rankings right now.” Which seriously was like, “WOAH.”
Fourth alliance was with a team whom Claire and I had seen at workshop last year. They had a pretty innovative design. They let us run autonomous (I think). Probably successful—unless it was the time that the block didn’t fall out, in which case, it was not successful. But I think that was the next round.
At this round, our worm gear started to struggle. We burnt out a motor, but we still kept trying to do arm functions, so only one motor was going. After the fourth round, we were in hectic chaos trying to fix the arm. But there was only a little bit of time till our fifth round, so we just went with it. We completely removed the arm and decided to play some defense and just run our strong autonomous. Plus do flag crank. Maybe do some sweeping under the pendulum goals.
We lost fifth round pretty badly. 110 to 52 or something like that. But it’s okay. We hurt the round points for the opposing alliance. Oh well. We kept working through the thirty minute break, and by the end of it, the arm was back to normal. It was tested. Everything was good. To be honest, if our arm hadn’t died on that fourth round, we would have gone undefeated. We fixed an entire worm gear assembly in an hour with everyone working. It was just—wow. Judges came by and talked to us, people watched, etc. Pretty intense. And while doing so, one of our table legs collapsed, sending boxes of parts down. Thank God it was not the table holding up the robot. And praise for really nice people nearby to help us pick it up.
Anyway, Claire and I were doing a little PR for final alliances. We got second choice because we were second seeding (we had high round points). A couple teams came by and asked if we would choose them, etc. But we took so long discussing (attention was really divided between robot and alliances) that our top two choices for alliance (ironically our second and third match alliance partners) ended up choosing each other. But then Coach Gary reminded us that we had higher priority than them. If the team we wanted declined, they couldn’t be chosen again. So it was either to go with us or not go at all. But they went with us, because we have a proven chemistry. And Jennifer reminded us that if the first place team chose us (doubtful, considering they hadn’t even spared us a second glance after lending us an axle we never used), we would have to give up captaincy, so we had to deliberate whether we could beat them or not.
So in the end, we went with my personal favorite so-far alliance. I don’t remember their team number (oop), but it was Claire’s friend’s team. They were really friendly, we had proven successful autonomous, etc, etc. We had really good chemistry. Their robot did exactly what would complement our robot. Their autonomous was strong and clear out of the way of our autonomous. And their tele-op was the defense that we really, really needed. To be honest, it was sort of amazing—they were basically our perfect alliance team. They’re not what we described when the judges asked us, but in reality, they really were.
Then Nelson drops a bomb on us. Jennifer wrote him a list of the teams based on priority, so if one declined, we’d have a backup. Even though we had chosen our third-match alliance partner, Nelson went with another team—the third place alliance/our second-match alliance partner. And it was basically a load of “WHAT ARE YOU DOING” and I started staring at him from the crowd and I just “WHAT IF THEY SAY YES” But they didn’t say yes. And so we went with what our team had actually decided upon.
Anyway, it was crazy. And to be honest, a huge amount of luck played into what went down. Plus crazy coincidence. Alliance 1 was captained by one of our final-match opponents, backed up by our first-match alliance partner. Alliance 2 was obviously captained by us, backed up by our third-match alliance partner. Alliance 3 was captained by our second-match alliance partner, backed up by some other team that I really didn’t know, but their names both started with Robo, so it was sort of cute. Alliance 4 was captained by the sixth-place seeding team (fifth-place was our partner)/fourth-match alliance partner, and backed up by our fifth-match alliance partner.
Alliance 1 vs Alliance 4 were first/third sem matches. Alliance 1 won easily. Both times.
We (2 vs 3) were a different story. Scores came pretty close. I honestly think that Alliance 3 was a bigger opponent than Alliance 1. But because both of our autonomous programs were strong on our Alliance, we always had a higher boost from the beginning of the game. Hell—we even got FULL DOUBLE AUTONOMOUS POINTS ONCE. Which is completely CRAZY, but it happened. Anyway, we won the first two semis, so we moved on the finals.
It was crazy. There was so much tension in that room. For the first final round, our autonomous block went overboard and I was like “nu i am sorry team i have failed you” but it was okay. We still won. Close. All of the rounds were close. Just by looking and guessing, I had no idea who won. It was also pretty crazy, because we would have lost this round, but our alliance BARELY got to full points on flag crank during endgame. We were like 0.2 inches above the marker when the buzzer went off. But we still won.
We went to second final round. This was killing us in the stands (well, our team was pretty much on the ground before the flags blocking us). Autonomous block got stuck (again). This is a problem we need to address, since it happened twice, and after the first time, Jennifer paid close attention to ensure that it didn’t happen again. Then tele-op. End game. CRAZY, I’m telling you.
And we won.
We won the entire tournament.
The first tournament of NorCal FTC season, and we were the winning alliance captain.
A rookie team. We’re 75% rookie to FTC. I mean, sure, yeah, we’re experienced in robotics, and we’ve got two veterans (one, who happens to be our crazy nutcase driver), but still—that’s pretty crazy. A rookie team—hell, a rookie alliance—won.
I think the sweetest part of today was the cheering that we got. I think that it was beautiful that so many people were cheering for us whenever scores went up and it turned out that we had won. Everybody rooting for the underdog. It helped that our ally had two sister teams present and we had friends from school to cheer us on. That really—that spoke to me pretty hard. It was like everyone was cheering on the underdogs to beat the veterans. YJ thought that it was just cheering for an intense round, but I don’t think so. Had that been the case, cheering would have been louder right after matches. But the real cheering went on when scores were displayed and it had been shown that we won.
And we—we did the thing. We won. The tournament. Anyway, we cleaned up our stuff, sent it to the car. Coach Gary congratulated us. Arrived a little late for the awards ceremony.
And then we were nominated for two awards: PTC(? Don’t know if that’s actually the name for it) and Control. PTC is basically building/design. Didn’t get that one, but oh well. We probably didn’t win because of engineering notebook. Eh. But we won Control as well. Partially because Nelson is a great driver and partially because my code (which actually is Coach Gary’s idea and basically his code but SHHH). And then they called us up for winning alliance, and I just — Claire called it surreal. At the moment, it didn’t feel that way at all. But now in hindsight, hours later, yeah. It seems pretty surreal.
After awards ceremony, we wanted to go to a Korean place for dinner, but everywhere was full so we went for Malaysian/Thai food (Layaan Layaan). We played Contact with the entire team (minus Nelson who decided he wanted to eat on the other side of the table). Ate for a while, played for a while.
Went to Claire’s house for after party. And we played DDR and Cards Against Humanity. It was pretty fun. I feel like we’re more of a team after today, and I’m really, really glad for it
There are still a lot of things to fix. That much is obvious. But I was surprised to see how our robot performed. Some teams eventually decided to play some defense on, but it turns out that our method of dumping blocks was actually less defendable than others.
I think we should change our block gathering method. Our sweepers broke off basically every game. In fact, at some point, I think some defense was targeting them. My dad and I were thinking about using the tire method. Also, someone mentioned a stronger driving train, because we were being tossed around. But at least we’re fast, if not strong. Also, seriously, that autonomous block getting stuck? No good. Engineering notebook definitely needs some more entries (actually, I could just change some parts of this post and print it for our entry on the day). Things like that. Also, now that we’re a better-bonded team, I feel less awkward about spirit things. YJ and I were thinking that we could have a chant. Or even before big matches, we could just huddle, do a cheer (maybe “Voltage of Imagination is greater than the resistance” or a shorter form like “greater than the resistance” idk), and send off our driving team. Also helps if we start a chant going on in the stands (mob theory) of like “V-O-I” or something like that.
We brought home two awards yesterday.
And it just—wow. Wow.
Thank you to the judges, the volunteers, the spectators, Coach Gary, the parents, and all the teams!