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The Segway may play for days in Uruguay. Eh?

Posted by Anna on April 17, 2010

Today was intense. What did you expect?

The day started out with a few nice speeches by various FIRST people (actually my day started out with me falling out of bed, but that's a different story). Woodie Flowers and Dean Kamen both talked the usual about FIRST's progress and science and technology, which wasn't anything new but nice to hear anyway. We also got a friendly letter from President Obama, and around noon the secretary of education stopped by to visit and talk to us, which was kind of a big deal and quite exciting. 

Naturally we couldn't keep up with yesterday's awesomeness, since it wouldn't be a proper competition without something going wrong. So for our first three matches we were frantically wondering why one side wouldn't go at full speed which made our robot turn funny. We never really figured out what was wrong, though we're guessing it was a combination of a jaguar and a motor. One of our jaguars literally blew up (there was black gunk on it, a hole in it, and the fan was pretty much dead). And after tinkering with it for a while it just kind of fixed itself, which worries me immensely. But oh well. It works. Don't mess with it when it works. 

We won the first match mostly by luck and penalties on the opposing alliance's part, then lost the second two because our robot was failing. Zazu started working again by the fourth match today and we managed to win that partially by skill (we were short a robot on our alliance, so winning with that disadvantage definitely took skill) and partially by penalties on the opposing alliance's part yet again. We also discovered that it's pretty much impossible for our robot to tip over, which is both awesome and very convenient for matches. 

Our last match was EPIC. We won 9-5, and made a last-second goal from the middle zone, which we've never done before and were really excited about. At least I was anyway. Then again I hadn't seen sunlight for the last several hours so I may have been in a slightly delirious state at that moment. And everything worked, and nothing blew up, and it was great! Yay! :D

Some team's pits are crazy. We haven't ever spent a whole lot of effort on ours, hence the hastily glued together PVC pipes and banners held together with zip ties and duct tape, but it's still kind of embarassing how shabby (and messy) our pit is compared to others here in Atlanta. The team right next to us even has a TV that rivals the size of our robot (they're not the only one either), other pits have furniture (actual real furniture, not tool boxes substituting as benches like we have), etc etc. Some of them are nicer than my room. Yeesh. On the bright side, I feel like our pit is considerably more organized than it has been in previous competitions, so we're getting somewhere. 

And for the team social, we all went to the aquarium where we were fed to a bunch of pirahnas. No not really. But that would've been interesting. I actually talked to a few random people from other teams, which was enjoyable even though I don't actually remember their names or anything. But I guess that made the social a success since it was sociable.

Apologies for any weird typos and whatnot. I'm a bit tired. I should invest in some caffeine pills.

Anna