Hey everyone! It’s been a hectic month here at TechnoWolves! We’ve had 2 more events and then have been involved with 2 outreach opportunities that I want to tell you about! First off, lets start off with the events, and yes I said events!
Our second even was on March 24th at UNC Pembroke. We had a great showing winning 10 games, ultimately being placed in first place! During semifinal matches we had a strong start but during our third match we received a red card for one of our fellow alliance members hooking and causing another robot to become non-functional. It was unfortunate and shook the team a bit. We did our best to come back but we lost the next match by 1 point. Even with that less than ideal performance, we are very proud of the work that the kids put in, and we made sure they head their heads high as we left that weekend. Plus, coming in first for qualifiers allowed us to qualify for the state competition at ECU the following week, April 1st!
We spent the next week trying to fix up Atlas, making sure it was in tip top shape for states. The competition was much tougher with all the top teams trying to secure their place for worlds. The scores were easily double the scores from Pembroke and the robot quality confirmed that. We ended up middle of the pack, but we were still picked for an alliance. With our score average being 159 we ended up winning our first match but then lost the next two, that’s how tough the competition was! For reference, our previous competition’s scores were in the high 80’s/low 90’s.
After our competition season we transitioned to working on a few outreach opportunities, one for FIRST and one for NC State. Last Saturday, April 22nd, we participated in SciTech at the Museum of Natural Science. We brought out Atlas and a small zone to show off what the robot can do for the kids to generate interest for FIRST and it’s different leagues. Tomorrow, April 28th, we are going to NC State to participate in their #IAMCS NC event. We are looking forward to showing students about the fun that we do as computer scientists and we hope to show off the programming that makes the robot do everything it can!
Hey there all! I know you’ve missed our regular updates, thank you for your patience while we crammed building for our first event! I’m here to tell you about our first event at Rolesville High School!
Our robot, Atlas, utilizes the swerve drive we learned about over the summer and fall to maneuver adeptly around the charge station and other robots to travel to and from the player station. Here we pick up both cones and cubes and deliver them to our grid. We have made the decision to travel to the player station instead of grabbing pieces off the ground to make our programming easier, we have 2 levels where our arm will snap to, allowing drivers to worry less about getting the position correct and move about positioning to grab pieces.
This event, at Rolesville High school, we had 11 qualifying matches in which we had a 6 game winning streak! At the end of qualifiers, we were solidly in 8th place, which allowed us to proceed into semi-finals! We allied with one of the top 4 teams going into the semifinals, but ultimately lost in the first set of matches. We are very proud of getting to 8th though, with our robot performing well at a majority of our matches.
Unfortunately, during the competition our robot failed when a terminating resistor fell off. This resistor was part of a CAN wire loop that helped convey info across the entire bot. This week we are going to find more wire and change the configuration so that that won’t happen in the future!
Thank you again for your patience regarding blog posts! We are looking forward to 2 weeks of upgrades before we compete again at UNC Pembroke on March 25th, and 26th. It is open to the public so if you wish to come see how fun a competition is, we would love to see you cheer us on!