FTC first competition~

As part of my mentorship with the Inland Empire Broncos Robotics club, we as a club participated in our first FTC competition on December 14^th. It had been a long night for Carlos, Regina, Miguel (sort of), and me. We had all spent the night awake and struggling to complete all the requirements necessary for competing in the competition such as the Robot, and our all-encompassing notebook, and putting together a presentation.  We all stayed up on skype and such to keep track of what each other was doing but at around 1:30, Miguel said he was going to take a little nap and that he’d be back in a bit and he was never heard from again. Regina stayed up with us through the night and worked very hard on completing the notebook. I had spent most of my day at a concert with Krystal that ended around 12:30. Then I took her home and drove to Carlos’s house. I got there at one and from that point we worked on our robot in between coffee breaks and snack runs. Our robot was finished at 4:17 AM the next day.

We had about two hours to kill before we had to leave the house and go to the competition so we showered and made breakfast which took up basically our whole morning. We arrived at the competition area around 7:30 which was the recommended time to come. Slowly the rest of our team started to show up and even our mentor decided to get out of bed and join us. We stayed outside of the Pit area and waited before they allowed us in. Many of the teams came in full uniform with vans and busses full of students and gear and us iPoly kids looked raggedy with our 3 boxes and our hastily constructed robot

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Inside the pit area, we all had to wear goggles and many of the teams began mingling with ours and talking and asking questions about our robot and ourselves. Carlos, regina, Miguel and I sat in the chairs, listless hoping nobody would attempt to talk to us. But they did.

We tested our robot in the arena and we did alright.

Much of the beginning consisted of inspections of our hardware and our software as well as judging of our team cohesion and robotic ability. Then after lunch, we moved onto the actual competition where we began to see who really knew what they were doing. We did alright considering that was our first competition. Many of the thrills and ups and downs of the game were crazy and exciting but in the end, we came out 11^th place out of 21 contenders; not too shabby.

We all decided to leave the competition a bit early and we got berated on that but we had won an award and the only one there to pick it up was Miguel and he was not too happy about it. We won the award for best presentation, no surprise there. All in all, it was a good learning experience and lots of fun for the whole club.