By Peter
Since the boys are busy, I'm posting a summary of yesterday's action. In the morning everything went smoothly and luck was on our side. For a few hours there, the team was ranked #1 in Spirit division. By the end of the day, almost every team had lost a match, with the exception of 8192A Shanghai Huangpu A and 35B Stark Industries which had 1 tie.
The first loss yesterday was a mixture of "things you hope doesn't happen." The other team fell over with 3 buckyballs, which meant those were out of play. When seconds matter, it meant the other alliance had time to fill both goals. To make things worse, the battery malfunctioned. Every team keeps a bank of batteries charging at all times, but batteries do fail. You just hope it doesn't happen during a match and only does it during practice.
The second loss was a combination of strong opponent and over heating. During the autonomous phase, the motor ends up running hot. The VEX motors are designed to shut down if it over heats to prevent permanent damage. When the opponents are strong, any jousting causes more heat build up. As a result, the motors may stop functioning in the middle of a match. The boys changed their autonomous program to reduce over heating. Hopefully that will do the trick.
The team is currently ranked 6 and the first match is against the 4th and 5th ranked teams. The super sonic sparks and justice league are solid teams. It won't be easy and a bit of luck can't hurt. I hope none of the robots malfunction and we see a great match.
From my experience programming and building complex systems, often things don't go your way. It's not that we "the programmers" aren't trying hard enough. Sometimes things are beyond our control. Often we try to solve the wrong problem or mis-diagnose the bug. Other times your opponent simply executed better and did a better job. At the end though, the key is learning from every experience and improving yourself.
The two remaining qualifier matches today in pacific time:
9:59 am
10:52 am
Playoffs start at 12:30
Finals 4:00
live stream 2014-vrwc-spirit-ms
Thanks to all the friends and families for cheering on the boys.
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