Robotics Comp Results!

So district champs finished yesterday (Saturday), and we sadly (but not surprisingly) didn't get picked for worlds (I'll explain this in a min). We ended in 32nd place (which is low, I know, but it's higher than last time, which is 38!!!!). Our robot only died on the field once (more in another min), but it was a ton of fun anyway! My team still stayed for the playoffs (which we didn't get selected into) and we screamed about 190/Gompei and the Herd, and TJ squared/88 (we know their whole chant by heart, it's baddd)!!! Then we got back to Boston around 9 pm, celebrated how well our robot, pit crew, scouters, and drive team did, and cried about our seniors leaving.

Overall, I would say it was a really good season, even though we didn't make it to worlds. Next year we will though!!!! I swear!!!

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How District Championships (DCMP) works

There are 2 divisions within DCMP, that play within the same building but have different fields (it's faster this way lol). It's 3 days long (ours was from thurs to sat, with loading in on wed), and you have around 40-50 matches on each of the first two days (96 matches in total).

These matches have a red alliance and a blue alliance, which each have 3 teams working together that are randomly chosen. There were around 45 teams total at DCMP this year.

Then, on Saturday morning, it's playoffs time! The top 8 ranking teams get to pick 2 other teams to make a 3-team alliance. Once picked, the remaining top 8 become backup bots (so if a robot dies, the top team from that 8 gets to replace it), and the remaining teams are disqualified (our robot was the last one out of the backups, so we never got called. But I don't think any of the backup bots got called anyway lol).

Then those alliances play against each other, until there is an alliance winner in each division. Then, the winners from each division play against each other, and then it's over!

Now the winning team + the teams that got picked for playoffs get to go to worlds, and other teams that did well but didn't get picked (it can happen!)

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Our robot dying

So, during one of our matches, one of the teams' robots we were working with died on the field. This was in front of a feeding station we needed to access, so we had to go around them. However, we rammed ourselves into that feeding station (which is normal, it's meant to sustain that much force, and we've done this multiple times before lol), and we somehow managed to also die!!! So now, 2 out of 3 robots are dead on the blue alliance, and we obviously lose.

Why did we die? The wire that goes from the computer (thing that has all the code) to the motors on the robot managed to fall out!!! Even though it's clamped down with a lot of force!!!!!!

But we fixed it just in time (we had a match in 15 min, and turns out there were a bunch of other issues this also caused lol), and we won the next match.

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Sorry for the word dump, but yeah. It was a lot. But it was so fun!!!!! My favorite team, 4311 (Swampscott Currents) was there!!!!! Eeeeeee! And 6328 (Mechanical Advantage)!!!!!!! Eeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!! The Currents didn't qualify for worlds tho, but Mech Ave did!!!!!!!!