2024 Competition - Crescendo
About the Competition:
In CRESCENDO presented by Haas, FIRST© Robotics Competition teams will use their STEM skills and creative power to turn up the volume as they design, build, and program their robots for action-packed game play. Watch the game animation to inspire ideas.
Our Season
Equipped with the knowledge and experience gained in the last seasons, our Louis XVI.V inherited the chassis and swerve drive we used with Win-Nguyen. After the kickoff, our design members spent a little over a week prototyping different designs to be voted for to build Louis XVI.V. Building the robot proved challenging due to our continual lack of experience and having to train inexperienced new members. Our veteran members had one year of real competition experience during Rapid React season.
Our Louis XVI.V did not perform as anticipated at Central Missouri Regional. First, we fought a screwy NAVX module, then constant grounding-- even though the wiring looked perfect. Our drive system would randomly invert itself. Then, we lost two reducer bases (both shattered). After exhausting all options, we took our arms off and played defense. The robot still browned out, but not nearly as many times (over 200 times versus 6). We ended the day 20th, but we were not consistent and not picked during alliance selection-- which is fair. We were the second alternate, so we could not pack our pit until the finals. Taking advantage of the extended time, our electrical team and programming team looked over the robot. They found that our lower arm motor (a falcon) was not outputting the correct resistance... which would explain virtually every issue we encountered throughout the entire weekend. Due to the problems at this regional, we are now forced to examine our strategy for this next, upcoming regional. We have three days.
Despite our challenges, we are proud of our students' perseverance. Never once did any of our crew give up.
During week 3 of the competition, we competed in the Heartland Regional. We started with the arm and intake/launcher reattached to our robot. By noon on Friday, we determined that to be consistently strong at something, the arm has to come off. We played defense for the rest of our qualification matches. We successfully defended against all the top-ranked teams and were selected as second pick for the 4th seed alliance captained by Team 5801 CTC Inspire and First Team 1764: Liberty Robotics. Our alliance fought hard through several hardware issues on our robots. We were eliminated by the 3rd alliance, who finished the tournament as Finalists. We are proud of the perseverance of this group of students and what they have accomplished thus far in this season. We have a little over two weeks to reconsider, redesign, and rebuild our Louis XVI.V for the last regional.
More to be added later.