League Meet 2 Play-By-Play

By Aarav, Krish, Jai, Sol, Tanvi, Alex, Vance, and Georgia

Task: Review our performance at our 2nd League Meet

Today, Iron Reign has its second league meet. It was, in general, a helpful experience and a great chance to compete with local teams. Overall, we went 3-3 and ended up ranked 9th due to our high tie-breaker points. Even though our record was slightly worse compared to the first meet, our robot performance was significantly worse, and multiple helpful alliances gave us our wins. Code bugs and poor packaging made the meet a significant struggle for us, leaving us with a lot of ground to make up during winter break. However, before we look at some of our takeaways, here’s a brief play-by-play of our matches.

Match 1: 118 to 15 Win

We ended up not running an auton due to reliability issues. Our alliance partner scored 30 in auton through a combination of placing the purple pixel in the randomized location, a pixel on the backdrop, and navigating backstage. During tele-op, we started slowly due to a long initialization cycle. Unfortunately, the axes on the field-oriented drive made the robot almost undrivable, and it took a good 45 seconds to cross the stage door. This was a recently added feature that had not been fully tested before the competition. When we reached backstage, the preloaded yellow pixel fell out of the Scoopagon, meaning we had to go all the way back to our wing to pick up a new set of pixels - costing us time. On the way across the stage door, we got caught on our alliance partner and yanked off their drone from their launcher. Despite this, our alliance partner performed well, cycling 2 pixels onto the backdrop and hanging from the rigging.

Match 2: 40 to 31 Loss

Auton successfully placed the purple pixel on the right tape based on our team element, albeit because of a somewhat favorable noise, but we took those. After the buzzer rang, we promptly switched modes, quickly crossed underneath the stage door, and cycled two pixels on the backdrop. However, our driver Krish had trouble maneuvering back through the rigging posts, an issue that could be fixed through driver automation in tele-op. We hurried back for parking in the endgame, but our opponent managed to hang from the rigging, which gave them the win.

Match 3: 38 to 48 Loss

During this match, our robot successfully scored the purple pixel in auton, and our partner parked backstage. We cycled 1 pixel onto the backdrop, but the messed up driving system, combined with a lack of communication during pixel intake, meant that’s all we were able to score. During the meet, we tried to solve the communication issue by creating a simple hand gesture system. Unfortunately, we ended up losing because of a penalty our alliance member incurred for interfering with the pixel stacks.

Match 4: 71 to 51 Loss

Before this match even started, we had struggles with initializing the robot and setting it up for match play. Because our outtake slide was not fully retracted, we also had issues complying with the sizing requirements, which took a bit of time to sort out. A comprehensive “pre-match checklist” that we adhere to could help fix this. In auton, we deposited the purple pixel properly; from there, things worsened. Because of a code bug in the transition between op-modes, we remained stationless for the final 2 minutes. We could not solve the code error during the meet, so this issue continued to hurt us. One potential reason for this was how many code changes we were making at meet, often at the very last minute, which left us unable to fully take the time to test out the changes.

Match 5: 30 to 34 Win

Here, we missed the auton pixel and fell victim to the same code bug that happened before, which left us static for all of teleop. We got very lucky as our alliance partner scored their drone and a couple of pixels, carrying us to victory(we scored no points in this match). We thought we had fixed the code bug during testing on the practice field, but we simply didn’t have enough time to verify that.

Match 6: 37 to 26 Win

In our final match, our auton remained consistent, but yet again, the code issue reared its ugly head. This meet was very much the tale of two halves. A sort of successful first 3 matches led to us pushing new code and build changes to get features such as the lift working, which eventually

We'll be posting another post with our post-mortem thoughts, takeaways, deeper analysis, and some plans for the future.