Event Recap: Texas State Championships 2023

Results:

Award: Gracious Professionalism Award

This past weekend, Spectrum competed in the FIT District State Championship. For playoffs, our alliance partners were FRC#5427 Steel Talons and  FRC#2582 PantherBots.

Spectrum had a 9-3 win-loss ratio in Qualifications. During playoffs, we lost our first match in the upper bracket, and continued to lose in our second match against 5415 Pearadox, 5431 Titan Robotics, and 9140 The Robobots, which ultimately eliminated us from the competition. 

Failures and Fixes:

Failure: The charge station couldn’t press down in a few matches.

Fix: Raising the rear bumper a small amount seemed to help but the charge stations were still not as smooth as in previous events.

Failure: Pulley flange on the inside roller failed at a print layer and fell off

Fix: Replaced the pulley

Failure: Elevator lower idlers bend at the shaft. The autonomous mode was stalling down the elevator and that was a contributing factor to it bending

Fix: Replaced, and have no solution that mounts them together for Champs

Failure: The elevator belt had a tear, which we caught during visual inspection before it failed

Fix: Replaced the elevator belt

Failure: Damaged the tread on one of our wheels. Because the replacement tread was significantly bigger in diameter compared to the original diameter, the discrepancy between the new and old diameter would affect our autos. This is the first tread swap of the season after the damaged one from Waco.

Fix: Swap treads on all four wheels with new ones 

Failure: Misaligned bumper mounts to the robot.

Fix: Bolting the ones that were aligned and it was fine for the rest of the event

Controls Update

1. Implemented AprilTag relative aiming for cube node scoring. The field pose estimation wasn’t accurate at our first two events. We made quick control loops to center us on the cube nodes for cube scoring.

2. The cone scoring command retracts the 4 bar and lowers the elevator at the same time, making that process quick and smooth compared to the districts.

3. Had high cone auton modes on clean and bump sides.

Planned Improvements:

1. Improved autonomous modes

2. Change to cube scoring to become more consistent.

3. Flashlight to help with mid-field intaking

Strategy and Scouting Recap:

• Our scouting went well. Our data was pretty accurate, and most of our match and alliance predictions were true. 

Thank Yous:

• Huge thank you to our alliance partners: FRC#5427 Steel Talons and  FRC#2582 PantherBots; you guys were awesome to cooperate with! We wish you a happy rest of the season.

• Also huge thank you to our sponsors: Analog Devices, Solarcraft, QAD Works, Team REV, Gene HAAS Foundation, ISA - Houston Section, Texas Workforce Commission, and Intuitive Foundation! You all made this brilliant season possible.

 

Event Recap: Houston District 2023

Results:

Awards: Winner, Gracious Professionalism Award, and Dean's list semi-finalist (Photon 8515).

This weekend Spectrum competed at the Houston District Event. We would first like to thank our alliance partners: 118 Robonauts, 2585 Impact, and 9121 Wild West.

Spectrum went 15-4 overall at the event, finished ranked 3rd, and was invited by the 1 seed, 118, to join their alliance. After inviting 2585 (and later 9121) to join this alliance, we lost our second match in the upper bracket and made it to the finals through the lower bracket, winning 2-0.

Our development subteam, Photon 8515, also competed. Photon went 5-9-1 overall at the event, finished ranked 21st, and was the first pick of the 5th alliance captain, 2587 alongside 7691. They lost match 2, won match 5 and were eliminated in match 10.