Iron Reign's Meta-Post Mortem

By Ethan

Task: Evaluate how well Iron Reign has stuck to its priorities

As Super Regionals approaches, we'd like to evaluate our past performance on post mortems, to see how well we've done, to modify our future post mortems, and to find new approaches towards solving our problems.

Past posts are:

• Mustang Qualifier
• Wylie East
• North Texas Regionals
• Oklahoma Regionals

Mustang Qualifier at Oklahoma

ISSUE: Time Management

We've definitely gotten better at time management in tournaments since this one, and haven't had any issues since.

ISSUE: Referring to Coach

Again, we've gotten much better on this. We've all grown more familiar with the information about our team. I think this was mostly a one-time issue.

ISSUE: Preparedness

We have gotten much more prepared for each tournament than the last. We made the 3D model we needed of our robot. We have our robot inspection-ready before the tournament now. We do still have issues with packing however, especially when we travel out-of-state.

ISSUE: Presentation

We've done a lot of practice for our presentation and eliminated a lot of stuttering and pauses. As well, our robot is much more functional than it was, so we're good there too.

ISSUE: Robot Stability

We switched to the LG 4 phones and eliminated all shutoff issues, so theres no problem there anymore.

Wylie East Qualifier

ISSUE: Packing

We haven't gotten much better at this, we even forgot our engineering journal in Dallas when we went to the Oklahoma Regional.

ISSUE: Judging

See above.

ISSUE: Robot fixes

• More 3D parts to combat wear and tear - fixed
• Vuforia fixes - not fixed
• Strain relief - fixed
• Lack of driver experience - fixed

ISSUE: Scouting Gaps

We have gotten much better at scouting, with more accurate spreadsheets, some of which we've already included in other posts.

North Texas Regional

ISSUE: Last minute robot changes

We did this at both this tournament and the next tournament, so we haven't done much to combat doing this. At the time, it always feels needed, but in retrospect, it doesn't. Here, these last minute changes helped, but ideally we should have finished them the week before and not the night before. At the next tournament, we made a system a week before, but ended up reverting to the old version the night before.

ISSUE: Lethargy

One of Iron Reign's trademark moves is being apathetic as possible, and this doesn't always shine well on us in tournament. We really haven't improved much on this, and we really should.

ISSUE: Robot Weakness

All of these issues were tournament-specific and won't come up again.

Oklahoma Regional

ISSUE: Preparation

WE FORGOT OUR ENGINEERING JOURNAL IN DALLAS. We really really need to work on packing for Georgia, and make a definite list and plan with people responsible for it.

ISSUE: Design Keychains

We want to have a trinket to hand out to teams. We started this in Oklahoma, but we should mass-produce items before the tournament.

ISSUE: Speed

We have designed a new gripper-flipepr system to increase our speed and have already built a new chassis around it.

ISSUE: No Relic Arm

We've designed a new Relic Arm that'll work, we just need to attach it to the robot and program it.