This was our first in-person competition. There were about 16 teams present at this Military Magnet Competition that lasted from 7:15 to past sunset.
It was a big enough deal that the local news (News 2) showed up, but I never spotted them.
At one point, it started to snow, which is a big deal in South Carolina, because it’s usually so hot that it never snows, so we went outside to enjoy the flurry.
Before the competition, we needed to attach our robot arm.
But then the servos kept burning out. Towards the end of the day, we even had to borrow one from another team!
We also worked on our autonomous program throughout the day. We have three versions of it:
- Parking from an angled start
- Parking from a 90 degree start
- Spinning the turntable and then parking
Which one we used depended on what our alliance mates could do.
Of course then we had to test the physical and metaphysical tweaks to our robot at the practice field.
Throughout the day we were also scouting to see which team we wanted to be on alliance with in the elimination matches. Luckily, we scored in fourth place in the qualifiers and were able to join the third place team’s alliance.
At the end of the day, we won three awards
- Second place robot alliance
- An award for our community outreach
- An award for the quality of our robot and its programs
