Allen Qualifier Post Mortem - Code

By Jose and Cooper

Task: Analyze our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for our code at the Allen Qualifier

Fresh off our first qualifier at the Allen STEAM Center, we decided to begin a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis for code. While we will have other posts specifying what issues we needed to debug after the qualifier, and what articulations we need to implement within our code, this article mainly focuses on our code progress at the qualifier, and what can be improved in time for the next qualifier.

Strengths

• We have completely overhauled our codebase to be completely compatible with TomBot
• We know how to use state machines to code autonomous much easier

Weaknesses

• Our autonomous only scores 5 points
• We had few driver enhancements so many manual overrides were used

Opportunities

• We can have a tower height variable that makes the arm go to a certain height when stacking
• We have plenty more things to do during autonomous and can make use of the turntable to make it faster
• We can use a color sensor directly on the stone gripper to detect skystones during autonomous

Threats

• Any team with a 5+ point autonomous
• 7172, they have many of our ideas for code improvements already implemented

Next Steps

Focus on building upon our opportunities, and begin creating plans for future articulations (which will be detailed in a later post).