ACME attended our third qualifier this weekend.  Since we already qualified for Nor Cal Regionals this tournament was all about practice and gaining some experience.  The drive team was hoping to become more familiar with the controls and commands, the software team was anxious to see the results of auto and the scouting team was kept busy gathering data on the teams during the matches.

This was the robot we took to competition.  You can see the dump bed which dumps the Glyphs into the Crytobox (the blue thing with the columns).  On the side you can see the jewel arm, used to knock the jewel off of the jewel stand.  Below you can see our intake, made of two compliant wheels and two core hex motors to suck in the Glyphs.

During the matches we had a lot of exciting rounds.  Besides a new design to test, it was Clara and Emma’s first time drive coaching.  They were joined alternately by Kellen, Oren, Kelly and Shawn, all drivers.  The pit crew was Ben and Kelly, who stayed at the pit to answer Judge’s questions and to hold down the fort.  John, Clara, Emma and Shawn were this tournament’s scouters and remained in the stands to collect info on the teams competing.

At tournaments, teams play five matches each before finding out if they have made it into the semi-finals.  As it turns out, we were the top team in the matches, meaning we got to pick our alliance partners first.  We chose team 5214, Tech Support.  They had an awesome robot that could fill a Cryptobox in under a minute and a half.  They were very supportive of our alliance and together we hold the fourth highest score in the world!

This was the first time ACME has ever won First Alliance.  We were over the moon when we won and couldn’t have done it without our alliance partners.  Northern California Regionals are tentatively scheduled for the end of February.  We hope you will keep checking our website for more updates and please follow our Facebook page.

GO ACME!!!!

Last weekend, ACME attended our second qualifier in Santa Clara.  This tournament was all about gaining experience and challenging ourselves, but we gained much more than that.

We started off the day by setting up our pit area.  This area is where other teams come to have a better understanding of our team, our robot’s design, and get free Red Vines (courtesy of ACME Robotics).  We display a pit board that shows all of the team members, our Outreach events and our robot design.  We also made a pyramid of ACME bracelets that were also freebies (because why not?).

Then we went into our judges interview, where we give a presentation of our robot and the judges ask us questions about it.  Our judges interview at this qualfier was one of the best we have ever had and are super proud of the way it went.

After the judges presentation we have to go around and scout the other teams in the pits. We scout other teams so that we are on the lookout for them during the matches. If you make it to the top four teams, you need to know which alliance partners you want This qualifier’s scouting team consisted of Emma, Kelly, Clara and Ben, and in the stands we had Emma, Clara, Sean and John.

After opening ceremonies the matches started. We just so happened to be one of the first teams up. While our first match did not start out so good (as our phones could not connect to each other), the next few steadily got better.

There continued to be problems throughout the day concerning the robot though – mostly due to connectivity problems. This outcome slightly dampened our positive moods, but non the less, we continued to try to overcome these trials.  A good sign was that after almost every one of our matches the judges would come talk to us about what went wrong during the match and what we were going to do to fix it. This was taken as a positive sign that we were in the running for an award.

And as it turns out, we were!  Even though things seemed not to go our way that day our positive outlook and perseverance came through. We were given the Inspire Award!!!!!!!!

This award grants you a ticket to the Northern California Regionals, the next step in advancing towards Worlds. We were so happy to have been given this award and are so grateful to the judges who recognized us.

The Nor Cal Regionals will be held at the end of February in Union City.  Look for our upcoming post about the Roseville Qualfier two weeks from now.  Go ACME!

This past weekend, ACME traveled to our first qualifier of the season in Folsom.  FIRST teams are allowed to go to three qualifiers each to try and qualify for Norther California Regionals.  Throughout the day we had some ups and downs, but here is a breakdown of ACME’s first Relic Recovery Tournament!

The team worked diligently in the weeks leading up to the competition.   We stayed up way past our bedtimes almost every night in order to be ready for competition day.  The Hardware and Software teams worked tirelessly throughout the past few weeks and we give them a big round of applause for all of the hard work and dedication they put into the robot.

As for the qualifier, we did really, really well!  Our Engineering Notebook  came together beautifully, our judges presentation went extremely well and our autonomous code (the part of the game where the robot runs on pre-written code) worked fantastically considering the Software team started testing code the day of the competition! ​​​​​

As you can see above, this is the robot that we took to competition.  This first phase of the robot consists of a Glyph lifter (the green wheels) that suck in a Glyph and then move up and down on a lead screw in order to place the Glyphs into the Cryptobox.  Attached to the linear slide on the left is the Relic Recoverer, or the Steve-Grabber, as the ACME team jokingly call it.  The red, 3D printed grabber at the end is perfectly fitted to the yellow game piece called the Relic.  Another unique design we developed is the periscope that rises up from the center of the robot.  Since vision is a very important part of the game this year, we needed a phone mount that could rotate in all directions.  This is where the idea of the periscope formed, and although it works rather well, we had a slight problem where the scope wouldn’t rise up fast enough so some of the code timed out because it could not see part of the game.

As a result of some of these problems, the ACME team is preparing to take strides to making our next competition robot better than our first.   Call it Phase Two, if you will.  A time for all members to reflect on the first qualifier and take the steps to improve, not just the robot, but our whole concept of the build time allotted, tasks being completed and, of course, writing developments and processes into the Engineering Notebook.

Another positive of the qualifier was, of course, the awards.  ACME won two awards this time, including one we hadn’t received in previous seasons.  This award was the Think Award, which we received for our outstanding Engineering Notebook.  Kudos to Kelly who worked hard and long in making the Engineering Notebook stellar.  The second award we received was second place Inspire.  Inspire is the highest award you can qualify for in FTC and winning second place was pretty amazing considering it was our first tournament of the season.

Going into Phase Two, ACME members and mentors are probably even more excited than when we kicked off the season with the 24-Hour Build.  Over Thanksgiving break we are coming up with ideas for new designs and planning out our schedule for the upcoming weeks. Watch out because ACME Robotics is ready for anything!