Wylie East Postmortem

By Ethan, Janavi, Charlotte, Karina, Abhi, Justin, Kenna, Arjun, and Bhanaviya

Task: Analyze what went wrong at Wylie

We performed well at Wylie, comparatively speaking. But, there's always room for improvement.

Problems:

The Robot & Code

• Latch
So our first major issue was the latch. We had put together the latch the week before the tournament and tested it the night before, finding that the bearings fell out of the nylon backing under the pressure of lifting the robot. Effectively, this meant that we could only use the latch once per match as we had to reset the bearings after each use. So, we're pursuing two avenues to fix this: cut the latch in aluminum or completely redesign the latch.
• Presets & Limits
Another issue that occurred was that the robot kept on injuring itself. It repeatedly overextended the Superman arm, causing its gears to disengage and strip. The same happened for the intake elbow - we didn't have limits set in so it would move too much and break. And with the belt arms, we stretched the belts out because we didn't have limits created.
• TeleOp Helplessness
Another issue was that our robot didn't function well between autonomous and endgame. Our intake was recently created, and as a result, we felt it better to not attempt to score minerals. We're working on a new intake for this, some combination of our old corn-cob intake but without the Tetrix pieces that made it so heavy.

Preparation, Presenation & Judging

• Prep
We didn't pack for this tournament and as a result, we didn't have any nuts or bolts, a pretty big oversight. From now on we plan to set up boxes to bring for the week before.
• Practice
Our presentation was better this time. Still, we didn't get enough practice. There were a few long pauses between people and we skipped a couple of slides. The only way to fix lack of practice is more practice.
• Energy
We always need energy, it's what draws people in and gets judges to remember our presentation. Currently, we do a mini-debate within the presentation over our design choices but we plan to improve this and make it more point-by-point. In the same vein, we need to be louder.

Pit Conduct & Misc

• Prep Scouting Sheet
We need to make a scouting sheet for the tournament ahead of time with past performance. As well, we need to make a second sheet prefilled with team names for the day of. This would just reduce the amount of time spent to prepare at the tournament and transfer it to weeks-before prep.
• Focus in pits
A consistent issue for Iron Reign is focus. People'll do their homework and things that aren't necessarily related to robotics in the pits and we need to stop; it always looks better to be focused when judges come around. We're still thinking of ideas to stop this.