Practice, and First Competition Day 2009-04-16
After a painfully early start (the team left the hotel at 7.15 am) we walked down to the GWCC to get to the pit area for opening at 8am, picking up some donuts for breakfast on the way.
The team settled into the pits and put the robot together (it had travelled minus its wheels as 2 years ago a robot that flew to Atlanta and sat in a plastic box for a week had non-circular tyres after that and wouldn’t steer straight, and we didn’t want to risk that happening again.
A couple of good runs on the practice tables in the pit area later (380 and 395 points) and the team went round a third of the FLL teams handing out good luck cards that they had made and signed, before the morning’s judging sessions started. Judging was 10.10 for the project, 10.30 for the technical and 10.50 for the teamwork, all of which went quite well. The team ran out of time to tell the judges all the good things about their robot in the technical judging, and the teamwork judges were quite tickled by the boys’ British accents and their efforts to explain exactly what a Jaffa Cake was (that’s essential fuel for the TechnoBotts3 team).
12.55 was the first practice robot run in the Georgia Dome – a bogglingly vast place! – and the robot was plagued with the variable light levels inside the Georgia Dome, which has a translucent roof, so clouds going across the sun have a big impact on the light levels on the table, rendering the calibration routine that the boys do during setup time pretty much useless. This caused the delivering the levees program to go haywire, which cost 50 points, and also the team mis-delivered the polar bear, which cost another 15 points. So that gave a score of 335 points – which was enough to put the team in 4th position after the first run.
2.20 was the second practice run – again, problems with wildly fluctuating light levels upset the levee delivery program and also the ice core rig retrieval and the ice core extraction – costing more points, so a disappointing 275 points for that run.
Another team scored higher than 335 on their second round, knocking the team into 5th place, but fortunately the scores from today don’t count – it’s how well the robot performs tomorrow in the official 3 robot rounds that’s the important thing.
This evening it’s the FLL opening ceremonies and ice-cream social in Centennial Olympic Park – the weary TechnoBotts3 team is currently in the hotel pool recharging, and we’ll take them for some food first to refuel them.