Syndication #8 Reference: GSMST Competition Post-mortem

[Paul]

This message was broadcasted by Nitant Dandekar on Sunday, Nov 7, 2010 at 1:20 PM.

To all:

I thought that in the interest of helping everyone, I would share my thoughts for after yesterday's competition at GSMST.

The results, by the way, if you haven't already heard: 1261A (my team) went 0-5 in qualifiers. 1261F (Logan) went 2-3 and became 8th seed, but lost quarter-finals 1-2.

Things I picked up:

1. Autonomous - much easier to program with a real field. If we can, I'd like to set up a competition field so that we can test both the driver control and the autonomous.
2. Programming in general - certain kinks are present with easyC that you'll have to adjust for when programming.
3. Downloading code - download code by connecting the wire to the robot itself, NOT to the controller. VexNET, with interference from every other robot in the area, couldn't handle downloading and failed numerous times.
4. The robot itself - be prepared for it to break, especially the day of the competition. Tightening everything beforehand will lessen your problems, since you won't have to worry about your robot falling apart while it's broken.
5. The competitive edge - advantages that I saw: picking up multiple rings, placing rings on the outer goalposts, a functional autonomous, pivoting, blocking goalposts, knocking down neatly stacked rings, and perhaps hanging. Descoring did not seem as important, but if you can do that quickly and have the other advantages, you're pretty well off.

That's all I can think of for now, but there's definitely more. Thanks to all those that came, and hopefully this will be useful to everyone as we move into the final weeks.

Sincerely,
Nitant Dandekar.