DISD Scrimmage at Hedrick MS

By Charlotte, Janavi, Ethan, Evan, Justin, Karina, and Abhi

Task: Compete at the Hedrick MS DISD Scrimmage

Today, Iron Reign competed in the DISD scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This was the first scrimmage of the year, so experienced teams and rookie teams alike struggled to get a working robot on the field. We go to this scrimmage every year, and it helps us gage just how much needs to be done to have a qualifier-ready robot. This year, that is a lot. We actually had two robots relatively pieced together, a main chassis and a backup, but we didn't account for many different problems that rendered them inoperable. In the case of the backup robot, the linear slide fell apart easily and was threaded so that it could only extend, and not retract. In the case of the actual robot, most of our problems stemmed from the intake system. Since we built it so recently, we were never able to write any code until in the final few days of preparation. We weren't able to debug the code and it has caused many complications in our robot. Our drive train also had many issues which we have been trying to fix and fine tune.

Due to these many issues, we did not compete for most of our matches. We spent a lot of time working on our bots and talking to other teams about their progress and plans for the season, as well as see all of the interesting ideas they have put together in fruition in a game setting. In the match we did compete in, we did very badly due to driver error and mechanical errors in the drive train.