New people need help

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1

We are the first team in the antelope valley, we are new to this and need help we have a lot of questions and would like advice

Are we supposed to bring out own table to set up at the competion?
What are the best stratigies for scouting?
What else is there to do at the competion besides driver and scout?

2

Welcome aboard.

I am not sure how things work in your lcoal area but the competitions we go to have a designated table assigned in the pits area for your team to use. But you may need to bring an extension cord and plug strip to plug in multiple battery chargers, computers, tools, etc.

You can search on the forums for scouting strategies. Many folks look at that day’s rank only. But you want to find other things about their robots - things like autonomous and how often it works, how many it scores, or any other special abilities. You want to see how the robot is being driven - do they score well or are they being carried by their partner? Things like that can help decide between two robots with the same record. You might reach down a few spots to get that robot that had some tough matches that day but is overall pretty good. That’s good scouting.

Other things to do besides drive your robot in matches:

  1. There is judging for notebooks and design awards. Sometimes they come to the pit table, sometimes you get a time slot to go to a room, sometimes a combination. There were some posts not too long ago talking about excellence awards and the criteria used. Find those to see what grading criteria the judges are typically looking for. (And clean up your notebook and take lots of pictures to help in the presentation)
  2. Participate in the skills competitions. There are two types - drivers skills and programming skills. Have a hand at least at the drivers skills competition to score a bunch of barrels in a short amount of time.
  3. Meet other people. Get ideas and help from others. See what works and does not work. Write down these ideas in your notebook too.
  4. Fix whatever breaks - because it will. Screws come loose, things fall off, motors might stop working. You never know what bit of bad luck you’ll get that day. But expect at least one thing to need adjustment
  5. Keep improving your robot. If you see something, start working on it in the pits. Sometimes it might be a good 6 hour build day for you.
  6. Improve your autonomous program. If you don’t have a regular field to practice on, there may be a practice field to do some tweaking or major rewrites of your programs.
  7. Charge your batteries. Change out the big battery every 3-4 mathes if possible. The joystick ones should last a lot longer but keep an eye on them.

Have fun.

3

Better subject line will get you better help sometimes.
Your competition event coordinator should tell you if you need to bring your own table. In my experience, that is rare. At usual school venues, you have a cafeteria table or half for your pit table. You might want to bring your own folding chair, with back, for your mentors or coaches, if any.

Rookie-team zero-level scouting is to pick the next highest ranked team.
Better scouting means to watch other matches and make notes about what each team does.
Look at the schedule of play, and go look up in the pits all the teams you will be playing with and against.

4

Read this:

https://vexforum.com/wiki//t/answered-vex-controller-io/12375/1

It’s pretty helpful for your first tournament.

5

There are two things you can do to scout:

  1. Have designated people to watch every match (even the ones you’re not in) and take notes on individual robots. Take note of their strategy and see how well it would meld with yours.
  2. Interview other teams at their pit tables about their design and their strategy. Pay special attention to the teams you are paired with in the qualification rounds.

If you are a rookie team, you may want to consider talking to the best teams at the tournament and selling yourselves as a good pick. Inexperienced teams are rarely in a position to pick their own allies, and are usually the third member of the alliance they’re in.

6

Does anyone know how to add limit switches to the program as well?

7

Just a note, this is not really related to the original post, so you should probably make a new post next time.
As for your question, you need to give way more information before we can provide you with any help. What programming language are your using? What is your setup? What do you want the limit switch to do?