The CHHS Bruins Team 6135B competed at the Technology Student Association National VEX Robotics Competition in Washington, DC and are proud to announce the final results!
Huge shout out to all the teams there, there were alot of good teams, and a really good team which I would have like to play, but didn’t ever get the chance.
Also in conclusion to my schools first year ever doing the VRC competitions I would like to thank the 5454 teams and team 323z along with alot of people here on the forum for being a whole lot of help throughout the year.
Also a big shout out to 1136A (Canada) and 1961C (Georgia), my alliance partners at worlds. You guys were awesome, and helped make my dreams of taking a first year team to the VEX DOME reachable. (3rd Place in World Championship Round Robin in the Dome!!)
I’ll be sure to post more shout outs, and answer any questions about my bot and any vex or RobotC related topic. Now that the year is over my team is open for questions (excluding major team secrets ) that we didn’t answer during the season if anyone has them.
As for me, its mentoring the future 6135 teams and maybe starting a VEX U Team!
-Michael Riggs
Captain/Driver/Programmer of team 6135B**
Really good job guys! Great robot, and congrats on excellence award (along with everything else). I wish we could have moved on one more round to face you in the finals.
Yeah, It would have been cool. You guys had an interesting autonomous, I liked it lol. I had one that scored 27 points that I tweaked over and over but never used it because strategy called for my other autonomous routines. There were 2 teams there that I would have ran it against for sure, but I never played against either xD.
I’m assuming we were one of those (and possible team 136)? Haha wow that would have made for an extremely interesting match! What did the 27 point auton do?
By the way amazing skills rounds! Some of the best driving and programming I had seen all year… Our skills rounds definitely could have used improvement; the fact I did most of the programming the day before leaving really didn’t help!
You, and the other team was 4377B if I remember right. You and them were top 2 on teams to watch for. And the autonomous launched 2 bigs hitting 2 more over (20 points) and pushed off the 3 buckies on the bump, plus the preload that is on the front tile already counts as 1. And picks up the other 2 buckies under the hanging bar and backs up to the middle zone. Its a potential 24-27 pts depending on where buckies land. Its kind of hard to explain. We had the program at worlds and when scouting early for TSA we found that the 2131 teams from Utah did a similar automonous from us scouting them. We played it out and that was a very good auton strategy to run against someone who transferred more than 2 bigs over the rail and had 3 buckied in the middle zone in autonomous.
It turned out that most opponents that we went against couldn’t launch the bigs like we could, but rather focused on filling up the tubes fast, so I went with the programs best suited for that. Which means less points in autonomous, but in practice matches I had 7 buckies in the tubes within the first 18-23 seconds of the match.
Sounds like a great autonomous, I wish I could have seen it! And yeah the 4377b robot was very good, but I don’t know what happened to them… They didnt run a driver skills, so they seeded extremely low.
Yeah, you guys had a great launcher, I was surprised (and relieved) to see how few robots could launch and hang like yours!
What happened was they were sandbagging. I scouted them alot before Nationals and watched their matches that they had during, and they were totally sandbagging in autonomous and matchplay. Even not launching the balls even though they could… they made it to the last round of single-elimination games but were DQ’d for intentional flipping. (That call still didn’t make sense for their DQ…)
And thank you, I worked on tweaking it alot, my bot was better for nationals than it was for Worlds (launcher-wise). But still was very effective there at Worlds. The trick was to adjust the piston angle and make sure the ball makes contact with the launcher bar as far back from the hinge point as you can get it as your launching. I adjusted mine to have more loft, which inturn allowed for more full-field launches.
You mean they threw it? Makes since, I scouted them quite a bit too and they seemed really good. They did fairly well at worlds (from watching live stream) and I remember how well they did last year at nationals (in middle school division). And I didn’t witness the dq call, but after reading about it on here I agree with the call, because we were issued a warning for the same thing when we faced team 136, because we were both playing a lot of defense.
We tried to make a pneumatic launcher but it didn’t really work and I felt there were other ways for us to get a lot of points besides launching and hanging; such as our “wings” and the big piece of lexan.
Yeah, there were so many different things to do. From scissors to 6-bars to all the others, then all the additions and mods. I actually started the year with a 6-bar (technically its called a jointed 4 bar or something like that) and then just added the launcher and winch and all. Personally, for my team we built 3 completely new bots after Worlds fully functioning but we ended up just modifying the one we used at Worlds for Nationals because it was the most consistent.
We kept pretty much the same design all year. Well, besides changing from a fast (and slightly unnecessary) 6 motor hs base to only 4 motors and adding 2 to the lift
One thing we experimented was a 6 drive chassis with a transmission to connect it to the arm motors for hanging. But didn’t have enough time to test it enough for Nationals.
) that we didn’t answer during the season if anyone has them.