Race Day

Race day: General Details

• Race day consisted of three tests or tracks: a circle (circuit) track, frequency sweep, and drag race. Our team was the first race of the morning for the drag race and we were immediately eliminated. Our morning started out pretty rough as we were having issues with a specific photoresistor throwing out incorrect values which was messing with the corrective code.

Race Day: Troubleshooting

• Previous values that we had recorded for specific tracks were not working as previously tested, likely because of the malfunctioning photoresistor. We had limited time to troubleshoot and things weren't looking good. We had been dealing with this problem for days and we couldn't find a reason for why the photoresistor was giving us problems. We had replaced the photoresistor several times, changed out the resistor, and checked the breadboard, but nothing appeared wrong. We had to choose to either hope that the problem would resolve itself, or make a change in the code to ignore the reading of the problematic photoresistor. Unfortunately, we didn't have the time to make a code change as we were called to the circuit track. After all was said and done, we managed to place relatively well on the circuit track with 8.75 loops. We also managed to pass the frequency sweep with the faulty photoresistor.

Race Day: Drag Race Redemption

• After losing the drag race in the first 5 minutes of class, we had been given a chance for redemption by competing in the "loser's" bracket. Prior to the race, our robot started to behave normal and we were hoping that the problem had resolved itself. Apparently it had because we managed to beat all the other teams in the "loser" bracket and make it into the finals where we had to beat the best team from the "winners" bracket twice in order to place first...we did. Our comeback didn't just come down to our robot's ability, but our analysis of our competitors. While some of us were calibrating the robot in between races, one of us was watching our future opponents to see how their robots performed. We noticed that a lot of the top teams had extremely fast robots, their times to the finish line were nearly half of ours, but their robots weren't very accurate. Relaying and translating this information, we were able to calibrate our robot to be fast, but accurate in hopes that we would make it through the track in one try. This was key to our victory as many of our races we won because we could complete the tracker within one or two tries. I think it's also important to mention how critical teamwork was to our success.