On October 17th, we hosted an off-season competition called RiverRage19 at Manchester Memorial High School. We co-hosted the competition with Team 131 (Central High School) and Team 501 (West High School and Goffstown High School) and this event is a major fundraiser for all three teams and is the oldest active FRC off-season event.
Our team was organized and prepared. We had some trouble in the beginning because of technical difficulties and problems aligning the robot for tote collection, but we helped other teams on our alliance by making smaller tote stacks to score quick points. At the end of the qualification matches, we placed 15th, and were selected for the 5th alliance. Our alliance made it to the quarterfinals, and we got knocked out of the elimination round due to low scoring points. We put all of our effort in to make it as far as we made it during the competition. Our team won best costume on our robot and best team costume awards out of the 28 teams competing at RiverRage.
On November 14th, we arrived bright and early at Prospect Mountain High School for the Battle of the Bay held by fellow FRC Team 319. For some of our team, it was their first time seeing an FRC competition and it was the last time we would play the Recycle Rush FRC game. The nice thing about this competition is that we got to compete with many teams that we have seen before as well as some new ones.
Much like our last event, we continued to work on alignment and communication. We did have a mechanical issue with our internal tote ramp during a match and had to change our strategy mid-match to push single totes and bins onto the scoring platform. We finished the qualification matches placing 21st and joined our fellow Manchester-area Team 501 in the 6th seed alliance. We finished in the quarterfinals, but our final score included a stack of two totes topped by a recycle bin and a noodle!
The lessons we learned throughout both events were about communication - between different drive teams, drive team to human-player station, and driver to drive coach. We also had alignment issues to ensure proper collection of totes to make our stacks. For the Battle of the Bay, we corrected some of our communication issues why creating drive teams that always worked together so they were able to communicate better.
In the coming months we'll be training and preparing for our next challenge. For the first time, FIRST released a teaser video and the challenge name: FIRST Stronghold.
