@bid.p, so what lessons can be learned from this?
I am an avid practitioner of the Murphy’s Law as it applies to engineering. In the real world s*** always happens at the worst possible moment and especially if humans are in the decision making loop.
I am sorry that all your fellow teams at the event run into situation like that this early in your learning. Reasonable lesson plan would call for you to learn at this time that external noise to be slightly different between home testing and the venue, not for the full overexposure.
You would be expected to look for changes in the sensor readings, instead of relying on hard-coded values, but not to have fully redundant logic and secondary sensors (using different physical means of measurement from primaries), should the primary sensors catastrophically fail.
Learning how to implement such level of redundancy should come much later in your learning process, after you fully mastered how to use the primary sensors in somewhat controlled environment.
On the other hand, you could thank the EP for teaching you hard life lesson way ahead of schedule. I think you now understand very well why I keep referring to the Murphy’s Law all the time.
I am sure many experienced engineers who are mentoring on this forum will be more than happy to help you learn how to do proper sensor fusion, where you use multiple sensors all at once to validate each other and detect any abnormal events.
As for the Worlds, it will be held indoors, just like the last year, and I would reasonably expect it to be consistent with past year environment, unless Kentucky Expo decided to switch all their lighting to LEDs or something like that. 