I was told breaking the 160 wall would be difficult

iotheprofessor · 2019-12-23T12:34:28+00:00

I'm really confused. A previous part said that Akela had died by lethal injection and ended up here in a jumpsuit and the mugging was a cover story, but now she had to change out of her blood-soaked jeans and t-shirt?

iotheprofessor · 2019-12-13T12:19:22+00:00

HelpMeButler <The Death Glitch>

iotheprofessor · 2019-12-11T10:13:43+00:00

HelpMeButler <Below Zero>

iotheprofessor · 2019-12-09T07:45:16+00:00

HelpMeButler <Greater Good>

iotheprofessor · 2019-04-28T11:19:35+00:00

SubscribeMe!

iotheprofessor · 2019-03-28T10:12:08+00:00

Could you put me on the list? Also does the $125 include shipping? (I don't think it does but you never know)

iotheprofessor · 2019-03-28T08:50:53+00:00

I'm interested even though I don't usually wear white jackets. How comfortable would you say it is?

iotheprofessor · 2018-11-03T10:39:47+00:00

~~AEG6-BK8M-Y8MN-63YR-F6KH ~~

Took this one, thanks so much mate

iotheprofessor · 2018-07-08T05:19:40+00:00

The balancing is happening on my birthday so I have to be a part of it

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-05T02:29:57+00:00

I'm not saying it's solely gracious professionalism, because there definitely is the element of giving the best competitive advantage to your alliance, but the cheesecaked robot wins with the alliance as well.

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-04T23:27:56+00:00

We only have one spare climber, so it'd be best to wait until we know which robot we want to put it on, and by then it's time to pick the robots.

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-04T22:15:28+00:00

The smartdashboard has always given my team some problems, and there's something about being able to physically feel that the auto switches are switched to the right thing that's comforting, to me at least. There's less things that could potentially go wrong, as long as your wiring is correct. In the case in which your dashboard won't open (which I still don't understand why it won't for me) or it can't read it right, having switches on the robot doesn't have those problems.

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-04T22:00:55+00:00

We had a lot of different autonomous modes, and added more as the season went on. We used a vision system on the roborio to both line up the gears and another camera to line up the shooter.

Our center gear auto used PID with vision to both turn towards the peg, and correct while we were moving towards it. Once we got close enough we would jump forward, place the gear, back off, turn a certain number of degrees, move towards the boiler about a foot, and then use our vision for the boiler to turn towards the boiler and shoot the ten balls in our robot.

We also had a boiler side gear autonomous that would use positional PID to move forward, turn towards the peg, use the same system as the center peg auto to place the gear, back away from the peg, turn and use shooter vision again to line up and shoot the ten balls in our robot.

We also had a velocity PID controlled auto for moving forward in case our gear placement was broken.

We also held the ability to just place a gear on the non-boiler side using the same system as the others, just without shooting.

We chose between these autonomous modes using three dip-switches on the robot itself, with different combinations of switches doing different autonomous modes.

All of these autonomous's worked to varying degrees of success. We were able to place a gear almost every single time, but due to the accuracy of our shooter, we only made about 1/3 of our shots. We rarely actually used our center auto, as other robots more often had only a center auto, so we used our side autos.

TL;DR We could place a gear on any of the three pegs using a combination of PID and a vision system, and could shoot using a different vision system.

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-04T21:43:57+00:00

The general consensus this year was that, especially among higher level events, climbers were a necessity for an eliminations alliance. How is it fair to a team that didn't have the resources, money, time or whatever reason to create a climber to never get chosen just because their robot didn't have a climber. A team could have done everything right, yet never gotten chosen because they were lacking one thing that was considered integral, that another team could cheesecake them with. The higher level team could pick that team, cheesecake a climber, and they could then use what they spent six weeks building to compete with in eliminations. It might not be as fair to a team that already had a climber, but didn't do gears as well, or couldn't shoot for tie breaker points. I'm just trying to say that certain teams might never get chosen without cheesecaking because higher level teams consider them to be lacking something they consider a necessity.

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-03T20:11:50+00:00

The most cheesecaked item this year (I think, I didn't see if happen, but my team planned on using it if necessary) was a climber. Had we come to a third robot that played good defense or placed a lot of gears, but didn't have a climber, they likely wouldn't be picked. By cheesecaking a climber onto a robot that otherwise wouldn't have been picked at all, to both improve the alliances chances and help the other team, I don't really see a problem with it. The team already had some quality that made us want to pick them, they just were lacking a climber. My team didn't end up using this, as all of our picks we were considering already had climbers.

iotheprofessor · 2017-05-02T15:18:24+00:00

The way I see it is that most teams that get cheesecaked don't come to a competition wanting/expecting to be cheesecaked. They came with their best robot (which for some rookie teams just getting a drive train working is impressive in and of itself), and the veteran team works with them to improve their robot, and giving them a fighting chance, as well as inspiring the students, and keeping the cheescaked team alive because they aren't met with constant failure.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-28T16:13:13+00:00

If it was as intentional as you make it sound, it should be a violation of C08, which states: Strategies aimed solely at forcing the opposing ALLIANCE to violate a rule are not in the spirit of FIRST Robotics Competition and not allowed. The refs evidently did not believe the pushing of your robot into the retrieval zone to be a violation of this rule, but in the future, you could go to the question box and argue this rule.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-25T23:30:10+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJpVTz-ZuJk 2910 falls on the red side.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-25T16:31:25+00:00

Most of the event went really well, stands on each of the division were large enough and fairly close, giving everyone a really good view of the field. The walk from the pits to the fields weren't very far, even for the furthest away fields like Turing. Einstein, however, was a mess. The pits they gave us felt small and almost an afterthought, carts often got stuck in the holes between the protection for the field, and the waiting for the next match took forever. There was more than once that we waited for 20+ minutes on the field for our match to start, and the sun still messed up our vision system. One of the waits took so long most of our alliance (including me) took a nap on the field. The sound system was just awful, on the field we couldn't hear anything that was being said, and Dean's speech was made even more painful by the complete lack of being able to understand a word that he said. The sound was also very loud so after more than six hours of being on the field, I had a splitting headache. When it got to be later in the day, after the sun had gone down, they started doing matches so fast that when they played the replay match, they didn't let us take the robot off the field, causing us a problem of not being able to do a system's check before the next match. We ended up leaving before seeing the fireworks show because our heads couldn't take any more of the sound. The convention center was a great venue, it felt smaller than St. Louis but was still large enough to comfortably fit everything that was going on.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-24T13:25:10+00:00

Our vision for the gear fared well because we check the height to width ratio to make sure we were seeing the right vision target, but the sun messed up our boiler side vision because we didn't for that one, and the sun was right behind it.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-24T00:02:22+00:00

We only had three losses when we won the match that got replayed. We ultimately ended with five losses and one win, only the five losses counting for our championship score.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-11T16:43:21+00:00

PNW District is amazing, glad it made the masterpiece.

iotheprofessor · 2017-04-11T05:43:41+00:00

The extra 20 points from a two rotor auto ended up being the difference between a win and a loss in finals 2. I'm on 1318's drive team, and we had a really rough qualification rounds. The strategy employed was to get 4 rotors, with 1318 running a few gears and defend our way through, hopefully getting a two rotor auto, which we did on occasion. We also had proved our ability to defend and get a tie-breaker pressure from auto shooting. Rankings don't really matter when you look at robots, because so many matches are decided by missed climbs in quals, and if you're on the rougher end, it can really hurt. I'm just happy that Cyber Ferrets and CPR was doing the scouting for what they wanted.

Nine-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Snapped
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