I don't know where to start. We had a blast, even though neither team got to the finals.

One of my teams had some technical difficulties with their autonomous mode, simply because they didn't want to bring it back to the testing area so that I could see what it was doing, so that I could tweak the timing and speed of driving, and its arm. Because of that, it flew out in to the middle of the field crashing into the center goal, while it was raising its arm. Its arm did get up to where it was supposed to be, but since it had slammed into the goal it was stuck in the middle of it when the bot tried to turn to its left, putting considerable lateral strain on the joint of the arm, which caused the plastic part of it to crack. After lifting up their third tetra of the match, the arm fell off. Lucky this was only the first day, and didn't count against their rankings, but when getting back to the pits, their instructor wanted to change the way they were playing. Eventually, all they were doing was blocking the robots on the other team from scoring, but they were doing it a little to forcibly. They put two decent dents into another team that almost got them disqualified.

The other team was a lot more cooperative and willing to do as much as possible. We got the auto mode to work decent enough for scoring. Using pneumatics, it waited 1.5 secs for the compressor to charge up a little, then it extended the lower section of the arm, which usually took 4 secs. Then it waited another second before extending the upper section of the arm, which was limited to only a second of travel, so that we wouldn't lift up the side goal we were facing. Immediately after that second it would retract the upper section. Then it was going to turn out to either its left or right depending on the position of a switch that the two kids placing the robot on the field were supposed to set. Set to "left" for the left side of the field, and set to "right" for the right side of the field. However, with running back and forth between teams, and having wiring problems with the transport cart, I wasn't able to get it to work right, so I just commented it out of the code. If I got it to work right, it would have turned out facing the field, drove out two feet, and then raised the upper arm section to its max height, so that pressure could build up for when they would drive it over to the human loading section. This was neccesary, so as to cut out waiting time, because earlier they would go straight overto the area, the human player would come off the presssure mat, disabling the robot, run out place the tetra in the robots hand, and as soon as he let it go, the upper section would come more than half way down, almost dropping the tetra, one time it actually did. With only fifteen seconds for autonomous mode and two minutes for regular control mode, the two to three seconds they were waiting for the pressure to build up was costly. Before I got the timing down for knocking off the hanging tetra, they would position the robot to face the field, and I just had the two sections fully extend. I would have liked to have moved that build up witing period back into the auto mode, but that last day, they only had three matches, with not enough time between them to run over to the practice field to do testing, and re-compiling of code.

There is supposed to be a webcast of the finals at robots.nasa.gov but I can't seem to bring it up. I can't imagine that they wouldn't have saved the file for archive purpposes. At the top of the page it says something about FIRST robotics, and then go down to the Boilermaker regional. It says something about team 111 setting it up too.