Once again... we’re back. I promise that I really do intend to keep the media going, I’m just distractable and forgetful. So, let’s getcha caught up on everything you missed. Starting off, we got a new team coach/mentor and after a slightly bumpy start he’s doing great and the team is accomplishing a lot. So far we have had one normal qualifier where after being picked for the semi-finals we didn’t move on to state. However, at the first meet our team has ever been to we won all of our matches and placed second in RP. In our second meet we gathered enough QP and RP to qualify for the East Conference Qualifier! Now this is where things get tricky, the robot you see above was not the robot we had three days before competition. After two snow days our previous robot was still having electrical/mechanical/programming issues, I mean seriously everything was going wrong, and we did not have the time to fix it. So what do we do? We rebuild our robot almost entirely with a new base and mecanum wheels that we’d never used until about a week and a half prior. We went into a competition with no working autonomous, no practice, and no clue on how we were gonna pull this off. And at the time, our strafing wasn’t working either (which I fixed today, we had the wheels flipped). So we go through the conference with an autonomous we made in about 5 minutes which was essentially a point and go to drop in the glyph (sometimes) and then ran our teleop like normal and won a few matches, but we were still middle of the pack ranking wise. So then the award ceremony comes, at this point our team was just happy we had made it this far and that it had been a fun a year. Lo and behold we won the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award to our complete surprise and were able to qualify for the Missouri State Championship, so strap in because this roller coaster isn’t over yet. Oh, and we changed our team name to the Wild RoCATics, forgot to say that earlier.Â
