The load in team got to Houston on Thursday. This year DCMP was held on the 3rd floor of the George R Brown Convention Center. The trailer got suck in traffic and the long line up the ramp to the third floor. We eventually got the trailer unloaded at 7:10 pm and just managed to get the pit setup before the pits closed for the night.

Thursday got off to a rushed start, we had to get inspected and fix an intake motor that we broke on Tuesday before we left the lab. Inspection went smoothly and we fixed the intake motor. The pinion on the ultra planetary wasn’t pressed onto the shaft far enough. This was causing the ultra planetary stages to bind when it was all tightened together.

Thursday of DCMP always has an odd feeling to me. There is a good chunk of time for practice matches which we try to make the most use out of. Then at 3:00 pm qualification matches start. I find its hard to switch into competition mode that late in the day.

Fortunately the robot was rock solid for district champion ship. Turns out we ironed out most of the kinks at the Waco District Event. We were able to play the entire event without any match affecting break downs. Stuff still broke though.

Failure: The back poly carbonate intake plate broke during out last practice match before lunch. We didn’t notice until we were back from lunch.

Fix: Attach spare intake plate

Failure: Shoes Broke
Fix: super glue

We also broke a few bumper dove tail mounts, these in there current iteration are sort of consumables. The dove tails need a little more reinforcement so they stop breaking. The bumper mounting system got a lot of fan fare at DCMP. We plan on making another iteration that will make changing out the parts even easier and slightly stronger dovetails.

Eventually the qualification match schedule was released and we dived into it. Our match schedule was good and it was up to us to make the most of it. We had a stacked alliance in qualification match 22.

During this match our alliance filled the grid. We put up the last piece at 20 seconds. I was looking at the grid for an empty spot and couldn’t find one. It was fun/strange feeling of having nothing left to do in a match. This match set the event high score of 182 that lasted for a few rounds.

Through out the qualification matches on Thursday our 3 cube autonomous was very hit or miss. We struggled picking up the two cubes on the staging marks. In the our shop we had been able to hit 3 cubes reliably. We used Advantage Scope and close up match videos to attempt to debug the problem.

Using Advantage Scope it is possible to sync up video and match logs(such a great feature!!!). We used this to change up our cube positioning slightly and we were able to score at least one additional cube the majority of the time.

We played through the majority of our qualification matches and were sitting around rank 12 on Friday night. At our scouting meeting we came up with a list of picks. You can find our scouting data for the event here.

Saturday we had one qualification match and it was a match we needed to get 4 RP from. Our alliance played amazing and we got the 4 RP. This moved us up from 12th to 8th and gave us a lot more freedom and options.

With our win we moved up to 8th seed and ended up as the 7th Alliance Captain, forming an alliance with 6357 The Spring Konstant and 7616 Cerberus. Our first elimination match was against the 2nd alliance 624, 148 and 4192, this was a hard match and we dropped into the lower bracket. We won the next match but were unable to win our second match in the lower bracket and got knocked out. It was great playing with our alliance partner ya’ll played great!

Wrapping Up

District Championship was our team’s last competition of the season. During the season we gained a total of 158 district points, the final cutoff for making it to Worlds was 176 district points.

I’m incredibly proud of our students for what we have accomplished this season. We’ve made some great friends, competed against the top teams in the world and are looking forward doing it again next year. Fun fact this year was the majority of our team’s first time experiencing an FRC build season and competitions.

It may be the end our our season but I have a few more posts that I want to write about things that went well this year, but don’t expect any major robot changes or upgrades 🙂