ladies, gentlemen, and my beautiful enbies *ITS TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*(ok so i admit this entry was written days later cause i had to go to school next day so my memory is foggy but! its still cool :3)
basically the first half of the day (before everyone came in) was spent finalizing somethings we’d waved off earlier, like

• cable management and wiring in general, especially the motor wires were dangerously close to the suspension rods and a bunch of other things like that
• power and attaching the battery, since we really needed to keep the batteries charged properly to prevent the pi being underpowered and the battery needed to be held on with something a little less flimsy than straight up velcro 😭
• THE GOD DAMN SET SCREWS HOLY TUNA THESE THINGS WILL NOT STAY TIGHT NO MATTER WHAT WE ARE NEVER GOING UP THAT HILL AGAIN ISTG (subtle foreshadowing)
• keeping the kill switch always accessible from the top and attaching it with a little more than tape and prayers
• making sure the wheels are attached properly and wont jut out weirdly as it has in the past, throwing the driving off balance as it
• getting the climb to actually work which is lowk a lost cause but we ball
• praying theres something we can do about the intake situation 😭🙏
• among much more

of course, the time eventually came when people started arriving (like alfonso, shoutout my goat) including a whole lot of parents. we started by showing them our robots as we made some final tweaks, like making sure the pi wouldnt fall off of our beautiful, incredibly complex attachment scheme (velcro mounting strips) until it finally happened…

COMPETITION START‼️
so the way this ended up going is that each team alternated runs, usually getting progressively further (keyword usually…)

Run 1: Team Big Fish (not us)

their first run didn’t go too bad!! their ball intake was suprisingly functional (and by suprisingly i mean at all) (better than us tho) and they were almost able to get around the cones autonomously without hitting one! however, when it came to the washboard, it didnt really work out…
their bot very quickly got stuck on a pipe and was ill equipped to unstuck itself, ending the first run.

Run 2: Team 10 (US!!!!!!!!‼️!!!!!)

also not too bad somehow!!!!!!!!!! of course there was no ball intake so we just drove over them, but we were able to slowly but surely get past the slalom with wide margins and very very slow turns in place. as for the washboard though, our run wasnt much better…
i took the robot off of the ramp at the start rather fast, making sure to turn up the throttle limit in the hopes it would get us over a few obstacles. spoiler alert: it didnt. we pretty quickly just crashed into a full cinder block, bending the sheet metal base and unsurprisingly making it hard to continue the run! but whatever it was not too bad for a first attempt

Run 3: Team Big Fish

this one was probably their best! the ball intake was great, and they were able to carry them all through a perfect no-hit slalom! unfortunately, a similar fate to last time met them at the washboard. third times the charm hopefully…

Run 4: Team 10

although the robot was slightly banged up now, it was still totally good to go! this slalom attempt was not nearly as graceful, and that certainly applies to the washboard too: i turned up the throttle limit more on the ramp and really just sent it, only to get stuck on top of that cinderblock instead of past it. fun stuff!