Title: Robotics Tournament and exam week
Date: 2015-03-01 21:33
Author: adam
Category: Robotics
Tags: exams, FRC, rant, Robotics
Slug: robotics-tournament-and-exam-week
Status: published
Attachments: images/2015/03/DSC00171.jpg, images/2015/03/DSC00314.jpg

Soooooo... Yeah. Writing things...

The robotics competition started on Thursday (just for setup), and went until Saturday. We (team 1786) were 21st seed at the end of the qualifiers, and were picked by our old team, 1729 (who were the 7th seed), along with 131 (CHAOS, who was in our alliance us last year) for the elimination rounds. We didn't do so well in the elims, and didn't make it past the quarter finals.

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My thoughts on the game/competition:

-   the noodles were much more important than I had anticipated. There were many matches where throwing them earned the majority of the points. (up to 40. for reference, our final qualifying average was somewhere around 20, while the first seed (1519)'s was around 80)
    -   I am not really fond of this: human players shouldn't be that important. The robot it the important part.
-   Autonomous rarely scored many points (since it basically required all of the robots to work/have an autonomous), with the exception of 1519, who could do a 3 tote stack.
    -   Also pretty annoying, since that meant that programming didn't really have any oportunity to show off.
-   Using average points was a bit weird, and I don't think I liked that much either (even though it helped us a bit).
    -   Being paired with a top team meant that you could have a very high scoring match, drastically rasing your average (and therefore your rank). The reverse is also true; a poor alliance can quickly decrease your score/rank. I saw one match where a team got raised 11 ranks, and in one of ours, we got raised 9.
    -   Previously each mach could only affect your team by adding or subtracting 1 from your "score," whereas here the change was much more significant
-   Overall, it was a lot more fun as a spectator sport than I was expecting. Each match played out quite differently, even when we did the basically the same things

I have a bunch of stuff written down (in [todo.txt](https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-cli/), more on this <del>later</del> whenever I get around to it) for what needs to be done before our next competition (in Massachusetts, after break). Since robotics season (the winter trimester) is over, I can only hope things actually get done.

Here is a picture my dad took of our robot picking things up: [![Pick Up]({filename}/images/2015/03/DSC00171.jpg)]({filename}/images/2015/03/DSC00171.jpg)  
And here is one of it putting things down: [![Put Down]({filename}/images/2015/03/DSC00314.jpg)]({filename}/images/2015/03/DSC00171.jpg)

Anyway, so this week is exam week (since robotics is always right before exams), and I am pretty tired/apathetic. I have three exams this time, up from one last trimester, meaning I should probably study, and this post is really just a way to procrastinate on that.
