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FRC 238 Bits and Bytes:
2019 North Shore District Event
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Our first on-season event of the year, North Shore, was held at Reading Memorial High School on March 16th and 17th. We introduced our new robot, RIDDLER, for the first time at this competition. Even though we placed 16th out of the 38 attending teams at the end of the qualification matches, we were selected as a second round pick by the eighth seeded alliance. We gave it our all until our elimination in the quarterfinal round.
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At this event, we won the Entrepreneurship Award for our team’s business plan. The Entrepreneurship Award celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit by recognizing a team that has developed a comprehensive business plan in order to define, manage, and achieve the team's ongoing objectives. Our business plan consisted of our financial statement, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis, and information about how our team is funded. We are honored to have won the award and take one step closer to District Championship! A big thank you goes out to all our sponsors for making our business plan possible.
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During this competition, our cargo intake was successful and our drive team performed terrifically despite the lack the practice this season. In fact, our competition robot was not fully assembled until load-in at this competition. By the end of our qualification matches, our robot was able to reach the Level 2 platform by hitting the ramp of Level 1 at a high speed. Another strength of RIDDLER was the consistency and efficiency of our cargo pickup. We were also able to make repairs to our robot with great efficiency.
Despite all of our successes, RIDDLER’s elevator broke during one of our matches. Our autonomous mode also caused our robot to drive too far, resulting in a penalty. We resolved this issue by fixing the autonomous code to stop the robot before it went too far. Something else we can improve on before our next competition is our hatch system. The current system is not grabbing the panels on the velcro consistently so we decided to go with a center grab system.
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We did our Chairman’s presentation on Saturday of the competition. We were able to answer most of the questions asked by our judges comprehensively and easily. We did not win the award at this event, but it was a great first live experience. We will continue practicing and will give another great presentation at our next competition.
The two aspects of the presentation we need to specifically work on are being more animated and slowing down. It is very hard to do both of these things when presenting, but they are very important to keep in mind. We will work diligently on improving both of these until our next event. We were also given the feedback that a visual representation would make our presentation easier to follow.
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We have grown close with Team 4905 Andromeda One over the years. Their alien mascot likes to sit with us during our matches or when we are alliance partners. As a ceremonial representation of our friendship, a member of our team traded shirts with the alien at this competition. However, Andromeda One is not the only team we interact with. Team 238 is one of the many friendly and helpful teams at our competitions. As such, we are always available to lend materials like tools, supplies, and game pieces to anyone who may need them.
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Everyone on the team is expected to scout and watch the matches so we can get helpful information before going in to alliance selections. By scouting our own robot, we are able to see, and improve on, our weaknesses. Although we did not use our scouting data at this competition for finals alliance selection, we are able to learn about other robots in case we see them at other events. We were also able to use the scouting data to help strategize for our qualification matches.
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