Nov. 21 Scrimmage

Written, but not attended by Ethan By Omar, Darshan, Jayesh, Max, Tycho, Lin, Janavi, Austin, and Ethan

Task: To test our robot and gauge other team's progress

First, the team arrived at the Virani's house and boarded the MXP for a Arkansas dry run. We learned that it's pretty bumpy for passengers when you're driving on the highway, making the experience a bit uncomfortable. We'll need to fix that for the 8-hour drive to Arkansas.

When we arrived at the scrimmage, it was laid out like a normal tournament, though there were only nine teams to compete against. The matches were laid out so that each team competed five times, but only four of those five matches counted towards your actual score. During the first match, things were looking up. Our catapult and intake system were looking great, we had scored two or three balls, and our driving was pretty nice. We ended up winning that match. Then, everything went downhill. First, we had a issue with a loose chain, which we were able to fix. After that, however, our robot's catapult jammed so we had no useful way to score. This led to us losing our other three matches.

Despite all this, we ended up 6th place out of nine teams, which isn't *horrible*. We were also picked for an alliance.

Reflections

There are teams very ahead of us, so we need to step our game up for Arkansas. Our next goals, in order, should be to fix the chain system permanently, stop the catapult from jamming, add the beacon presser, and add the yoga-ball lifter. However, our collection system was really nice and worked >95% of the time. The only problem with it was that balls occasionally got stuck on top of the robot delivering to the catapult.