Well, my first tournament was a disaster

VEX IQ General Discussion General Discussion
1

Enter, my team to our first tournament. We had barely even had the chance to practice full games with our robot, much less create strategies.

When we went to inspection, we discovered that the beams holding our wheels were slightly out of the size. Trying to fix it led to us redesigning our entire base(Redesign:1.) We went through inspection again, and it fit! Except, only when offline. When lifting the claw, even a little, it exceded the horizontal limit, once again, something we hadn’t even thought about. We went back(we had the luxury of this being at our school, so we had access to all of our stuff) and redesigned our arm.(redesign:2) going back to inspection led to us being about 0.1 inch off, however we fixed it by moving the license plate, and finally had an affirmative.

We then went to skills, and did driving skills 3 times, getting a 0 each time. After that, there were about 10 minutes left for skills, and so I desperately went to program. I was programming up until the last minute, and rushed over. I then was told I had made an oversight with how I programmed: to give it time to calibrate inertial, I had programmed it to work after pressing a button on the controller. This of course, was not allowed, and we were not able to compete in automation as time was up.

Then, it was time for teams/alliance I wont write a block of text for this, but to sum it up, our robots claw started slipping, we dropped it and had to piece it back together, it exploded during practice, and we were teamed with 3 slightly modified Huey’s and 2 teams that were both at last place when we worked with them. We wound up ending the game in dead last, with an average score of about 9.75 over 6 games.

So, I know am a believer of Murphys law. And we also saw a bunch of cool robots to be inspired by.

How was your first tournament?

(Repost bcz I accidentally deleted my first post)

2

Sounds like many excellent learning opportunities along with several strong arguments for making sure to understand the game manual. I am sure your team and bot will be much more prepared next time. And if all else fails, remember the angled starting pins and 2+ scoring objects in contact with the bot.

3

Firstly, I’m sorry, I can very much empathize with you. During my first year I had an experience similar to this. We were in sixth grade competing for the first time in a VEX V5 competition, and literally everything went wrong. It was so bad that several of us wanted to quit VEX, but we managed to push through, get to states, and ALMOST make it to worlds.

Secondly, to completely redesign the base and the arm under tournament pressure and still get through inspection is incredible. Most teams spend weeks on those changes. You did it in hours.

Thirdly, I don’t mean to offend you or be rude, but a lot of your problems could be avoided with better preparation. I know you did not have time to do anything, but something to keep in mind for the future is to ALWAYS read the rulebook. You need at least one person who knows the rules fully so you can avoid getting in trouble due to a rule in the rulebook. Also, make sure that whenever you build something that it follows all inspection rules.

Finally, you learned so many lessons due to this competition, and probably got a lot of ideas. Think of these lessons, iterate, and come back strong.

Go crush it in your next tournament! :saluting_face:

4

I guess I got spoiled with my first ever tournament… We finished in 3rd place and won teamwork 2nd place.

As for you, @maxoliver, I hope you can continue to improve your robot and absolutely demolish in your next tournament. I have a few tips for you, though. Before the competition, try to make sure you fit in the size limit. Maybe code the robot before the next competition too? Let your drivers have some practice for driver skills, and definitely make sure your robot is ready for the competition, (make sure it is sturdy and that it can actually score a pin). And, as for the bad rankings, you’re gonna have to learn to live with it, you have no control over your schedule.

I hope this helps, and good luck!

5

There’s always a way you can capitalize on this, like all the experience you’ve gained or the lessons learned, so I wouldn’t take it as a bad thing especially for a first competition. Can’t say the same for myself (I made it to the round of 16), but I have known teams, who’s robot didn’t have the capability to score points. So, it definitely could have been a lot worse.

6

I did code it prior, however as we changed the size of the robot and the arm length, my code was unusable.

7

One of the things that I recommend is for you to build your “home” sizebox / device / whatever to be 1/2" smaller than the official measurements. That way when you are “really close” on your home size, you will be within the limits.

Good post, good lessons learned, thanks for sharing.

8

What was your first robot for this competition

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It was basically a claw bot with a bigger claw and base, and better controls

10

Hi first I’m very sorry(not trying to be mean) but it was kinda your own fault you should have measured first this reminds me of my first ever competition in full volume(actually all of them) we built a basic bot upgraded once and didn’t take any inspiration from anywhere so yeah we were the worst team in the competition the next year my team made our own design and took inspiration from others missed state but one of the only 2 qualifying competitions we went to we got 2nd in finals and 4 or 5 in skills with our best driver and our coder not even there our other competition we were 4th in finals (don’t remember skills but decent(this one we didn’t have auto)) so always take inspiration(from anywhere doesn’t have to be completions could be youtube doesn’t even have to be vex(your inspiration)) but don’t copy exactly make it your own

11

We idn.t have a measuring thingy that was accurate so we just used a tape measure.

12

First of all, you guys pulled off an insane amount of damage control. Most teams (especially new ones) wouldn’t have even made it past inspection in your position, and the fact that you did shows that your team has an exceptional level of adaptability and teamwork.

I was also in a similar position last year (in a different competition, first tech challenge. Similar sized robots, way more design freedom, way less defense, and more difficult scoring objectives). I was running as a solo team since the main one didn’t really let me get involved much. Anyway, my first competition was an absolute disaster. Nothing worked mechanically, I had power issues since the control hub (equivalent of the v5 brain) decided to kill itself halfway through, and I couldn’t even play defense in any meaningful way since the kiwi drive I ran is kinda fundamentally useless at that (and cuz said control hub disconnected if it was breathed on too hard). Overall I placed second to last.

But, in the month between that and my next event, I kept working at it. Through all the issues, I could still see that it had serious potential. So I didn’t change much, I just continually tuned and drove it, making adjustments as parts broke or became a limiting factor in its speed. There weren’t any massive jumps, just a slow but steady improvement in scoring and consistency, until eventually it became a serious threat.

At the next event, I made a deep run into the elimination bracket. At the event after, I qualified for states (that’s a HUGE deal due to competitive my region is, and how small sc’s are for ftc) after a really close match between me and my main team in finals (I lost, but still qualified)

Moral of the story: don’t let your first comp define your season. It may take months, maybe even multiple seasons, but steady efforts to improve will eventually pay off.

Oh, and maybe don’t use a claw for scoring, that’s definitely not optimal.

13

Yeah, we scrapped our bot for spare parts and are now working on a much better design.

14

Last year we were sawing off parts of our robot at inspection :sob: