The first BC event of the year was yesterday, and what a brawl it was. There were 44 teams competing, and it demonstrated what we learned at the Redmond Jump Start tournament in November – no one school dominates the Northwest any longer.
I left my brand-new 8GB thumb drive at the event, so I don’t have all the results handy, but if I remember correctly:
Champions were 10B, 1107B, 10Z
Robot Skills, 1346A, 90 points
Programming Skills, 1700A(?)
Excellence, 10B
The top teams came from Cambie, David Thompson, West Whalley, Moscrop, Exo, and Gladstone. Last year that list would have had two schools on it.
I couldn’t be happier. Just about every match is tough, and the eliminations are brutal. It was great.
there were also 4 courts too
two courts ran simultaneously
without the extra courts, the competition may have run past 8:00pm!
10B deserved the excellence and it was great working with them for a change
(you did that on purpose so we wouldn’t team up with Moscrop and win again didn’t you ;))
too bad 575’s cortex blew, guess well have to wait until Courtney to see them run
we took lots of videos, and it will be posted up shortly (if my friend can find his usb cord -.-)
there were some interesting designs as well
and i think our robot as of now will be scrapped
our team wants to try out different designs and strategies before worlds
see you all at Courtney
It was great working with you guys too, and your awesome autonomous saved us more than once!
You’re scrapping your design? That’s sad to hear, but I hope you guys come up with something even more amazing :P. For us, I think we’ll spend our time perfecting the design and spending a long long time on autonomous. We also need to find a way to hang…detachable hook, pneumatics, anyone?
Anyway, the tournament at Cambie was one of the most action packed and intense tournaments ever (so many great robots), especially for December. Hope to see you all on the field again sometime.
I’m not sure if it wasn’t a Thompson/Moscrop alliance that they blocked, but I really enjoyed the confused look on the faces of the captains when they realized that by declining an invitation, they forfeited the right to accept other invitations! It SO pays to read the WHOLE rule book.
Great tournament… congratulations to all. I’ll have some photos up soon.
Jason
P.S. Predictions for a future tournament:
A robot that can push the mobile goals in to a corner, so that you can “score’n’store” your goals all in the same corner, making it easier to protect them from descoring. In fact, just pushing a goal in to a corner would protect it from most descoring efforts.
A robot that sacrifices points in auto mode in order to grasp a stack of the opponents tubes and deposit them under the ladder before driver mode even starts.
A robot that can store and carry ten or more of the opponent’s tubes and then go out and score their own tubes.
We saw a couple of teams doing this at the Southern Ontario event. They would score one stack or a preloaded tube, then go pick up and place an opponent’s stack in the ladder. The strategies in this game are really evolving.
This is the amazing thing about robotics: strategies aren’t always apparent initially in the season and they change dramatically by World Championships. In every single match, our team tried to move at least 3 stacks of enemy tubes into the ladder by either picking their stacks up directly, or waiting for them to score, then to descore and move them into the ladder.
If robots can basically clear the field at this point in the season, I predict robots having to adapt to picking up tubes in the ladder or some other way of preventing all their tubes from being “unscorable”.
now im SURE you hired a spy among us
nothing solid yet, but we’re getting a basic idea…
just a quick question
can your design (rollers) pick up a stack of 4, score it, and then take 2 off back onto your robot? (to be scored at another goal)
this strategy is used by may claws to prevent descoring all 4 tubes in one attempt
and i noticed that you didnt do this much
just wondering
thanks
Yes, during the quarter finals, with the alliance teams ranked 4 and 5, there were only about 6 tubes left at the end of the match that weren’t in the ladder…the scores of the matches were relatively lower than last time at the Toronto Regional where not many tubes were under the ladder.
No, we didn’t actually do this, our primary strategy was to score the wall posts (which most robots have trouble descoring) and putting tubes under the ladder. Our robot is capable of splitting stacks, but we just didn’t focus on that (whoops). In retrospect, I think we should start doing that…
Actually, our main strategy was to score the wall posts (usually harder to descore) and then to put tubes under the ladder. We didn’t really consider splitting the stacks, but in retrospect, we probably should have! We will be sure to do that from now on. Now to make a separate descorer…
Yeah, he games a lot… and he’s a gifted controller. He never had practice either. He did very good.
I’m not sure if my school has the funds for that. It’s going to cost too much, $50 to get in, $100 for transportation, $50 for food, etc… I’ll try my best to be there =p
