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Ow my feet

Posted by Anna on April 16, 2010

Well the first day of the 2010 Championships are officially over, and what a day it was!

This Thursday was a bit different from other Thursdays of typical competitions, because it wasn't dedicated solely to practice matches. Instead we only had practice matches until lunchtime, and then after the lunch break we started the seeding matches. I guess this is to make up for the huge increase in the amount of teams at the competition this year, and if we tried to pack all the seeding matches into Friday and Saturday morning they wouldn't fit. 

There was some concern that we wouldn't be up and running in time, because for the last two competitions this year we've spent the entire practice Thursday working on our robot and just barely having it out on time on Friday morning. However, there was no reason for our worries because the robot was actually in working condition before our first practice match and we made it out on the field for both our practice matches this morning, and both times Zazu worked perfectly fine! This of course was a new concept for the team to handle, and it took a bit of adjusting for the team to get used to the fact that we didn't have to scramble to fix the robot between every match.

Our seeding matches went similarly smoothly; in fact, they couldn't have gone much better. We didn't have any dire problems with communications (though there were some disturbing red flickering lights, but they went away before the match started so we didn't worry about those too much), gamepads, toughboxes, driver stations, or anything else majorly important. In our first two matches we successfully scored around five points each match (With the kicker! Our kicker actually works in competition and not just on the practice field!), and almost scored in autonomous but just missed by a few inches. Oh well. We still did a good job showing off. 

The only problem we really had was in our last match when it turned out a chain fell off on one side, and later we found out that the jaguars had been miscalibrated on the other side (essentially we were driving with two wheels in that match). Fortunately since that was the last match we had plenty of time to fix those problems, and fix them we did (and we weren't even frantically fixing stuff at the last minute before the pits closed). And even with those problems we still won that last match, putting us at 3-0! For a time we were in first place, but other robots ended up getting more seeding points than us, and now we are currently in sixth. This was quite the shocker for us, as from out last two competitions we've been used to being happy for not being among the last 20. So we're really happy with how the robot performed today, and we're hoping for similar results tomorrow! We have a few tough matches, so those'll certainly be fun to watch.

It was also rather touching that a few teams remembered us and said stuff like "We missed you last year!" and whatnot. Maybe it's the green shirts (although there's a lot of green teams here), but it's just really nice that we're recognized and appreciated. People like us, yay!

Anywho, we're currently staying in the CNN Hotel place thing whatever it's called. It's really convenient because it's so close to the Georgia Dome where the actual competition is, and it's also pretty much right smack dab in the middle of the CNN food court. The only downside is that there's no free internets, so I have to do all my blogging down in the lobby where it's very lonely or mooch off of the mentor's internet that the paid for. Oh well. 

I also feel inclined to brag about how nice the weather is. It's really really really really nice. Actually the weather in MN isn't too bad either right now, but... It's really nice weather here. Actually I haven't spent too much time outside because I've been lurking in the pits and traversing the underground tunnel that connects the pits to the arena, but within the next two days I'll have to sit outside a bit and soak up some vitamin D.

There's an amazing lego exhibit off to the side of all the FRC pits. Apparently there's a really intense lego builders club somwhere in Florida, and they spent a whole lot of time constructing a highly detailed lego city that's about, oh, 10x20 feet. Ish. I'm bad at guessing distances. Either way it's huge, and they have a motor lego train zooming around it, and there's a bunch of zombie lego people and lego dinosaurs and a lego batman and three lego spidermen, and it's really, really epic. I hope people took pictures to put up on the website, because it's beyond cool. 

There's a whole lot of other stuff that happened too, but this is getting long and I could use some sleep. Caffeine stops working after a point I've discovered. Goodness I've forgotten how much fun the FIRST Championships are.

Anna