Blog #3: Silicon Valley Regional

Last weekend Bellarmine's Team 254 competed at the annual Silicon Valley Regional. Similar to the last robotics competition, I helped with the scouting. This competition was a bigger competition with a larger pool of competitors. During the competition when they were giving an intro to team 254, I was really amazed by the fact that we have won 20 of the 23 silicon valley regionals we have went to. Also, we changed our robot from San Fransisco Regional. We added some pre-sets meaning that instead of the driver and operator toggling between the different heights, they can just press a button and the robot will go a to pre-set height. This helped our drivers a lot with accuracy and improved our overall robot as a whole. Through this I realized the importance of coding. Many of the upper class-men would joke that when the robot broke, it would be the programmers to blame, and the programmers to fix it. This is oddly true however. Because robots wouldn't be able to run without programs, programmers have a really important task they have to deal with. Furthermore, excellent programmers can also make other people's lives easier by setting "pre-sets" like we did to enhance and improve out robot. At the competition we partnered with teams 5499 and 6418 to win the Silicon Valley Regional, qualifying all of us for the Houston World Championships. This is my third robotics competitions. My second was San Fransisco Regional and my first robotics competitions was an offseason competition called MadTown Throwdown from the previous season. This was a very special experience since Team 254 has never brought first semester freshmen to any robotics competitions in the past. Since this was so special, the freshmen got to control their own team called team 9254. Since it was a subteam of team 254, I was able to help it pit-crew, scouting, and drive team. In fact, I was able to drive during the elimination rounds for 9254. Being apart of team 9254 really taught me the importance of leadership and teamwork.

I have decided to start posting the link to the competitions to show our progress during the competition.

Silicon Valley Regional: https://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2019casj

MadTown Throwdown: https://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2018mttd

MadTown Throwdown Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=248&v=gES8XCcBMXU