2023 Houston Championships Review

Travel

Good things

• Nice weather
• Flexibility in how to get there and when
• Things to consider/do differently next time
  • Possibly go a bit earlier and stay a bit later if affordable (felt rushed, might feel less chaotic to acclimatize)
  • Remember border crossing can take time

Food

• Can share restaurants that are good in Houston for next time(s) since Houston is confirmed until 2025
  • Flying Saucer - Sylvan
  • Team dinner restaurant was nice - Guadalajara
• Karly did a grocery store every day and stocked hotel mini fridge, good for lunches but expensive
• Lunch took a long time to get (min 1.5 hours) and was expensive
• Next time could look at doing something different to streamline?

Accommodations

• Westin was ok but there was loud music
• AirB&B has advantage of a kitchen but disadvantage of needing a rental car
• Club Quarter was 7-8 min walk - Finlay
• Other AirB&Bs people stayed at were far away and required an uber
• Would be good to book earlier next time, assuming we’re confident that we are qualifying
• Have to book through FIRST’s system since they have contracts with most hotels
• Walking in is preferred to driving in by most people, gives flexibility for attending block party and making trips back

People who weren’t in Houston

• Watch party was small
• In-person watch party was smaller
• Found it was better to have a group call/huddle but everyone watches the stream on their own device (streaming quality was not very good)

Social part of the experience

• Was cool to talk to other teams as part of the drive team
• A lot of interaction between teams in the stands and pits
• Event was tiring so not always up for much social interaction at the end of the day
• Was nice to meet up with friends from other teams on the Saturday and Sunday
• Was nice to talk to other FIRST people on flights to/fro
• Immediate area was good/safe but a few blocks out were not so nice/safe

Load in/load out

• Would be good to have information further in advance next time (ideally we know whether we qualify earlier so we know who is going, when, where people will be, etc. etc.)
• Even if we are driving the robot back, we have to go to the ship desk (doesn’t have to be on Saturday, can be any time during the event)
• Fill out the event feedback form to say that more details on how load in/load out works
• Guide book was confusing because there were many different sources and some things were conflicting
• Being early in the line was really good (some years we have been stuck in line even after pits open)
  • Lined up at 6:00 or 6:30AM, was one of the first few cars and no more cars showed up for the next hour so 7:00 or 7:30 might be ok
• Getting badges was a long line, there were multiple places to do that but the volunteers didn’t make that clear until later
• Know which stall our pit is meant to be in ahead of time (all load in people should know where to go beforehand)
• The shipping people confused our pit during the setup, it wasn’t labeled
• Load out took a really long time (2 hrs?)
• Karly says there were 3 lines, probably could go to the first one earlier next time and put our things closer to the bay doors
• Getting the stuff packed up and into the trailer went smoothly
• Had enough people for load out
• Had issues with the wheels on the tool box, Andy was able to fix them temporarily (good thing is that we should be replacing the toolbox with the new pit design anyway :D)

Pit

Good things

• Saw other well-made pits, inspiration for our own new Pit design (modules were good)
• Swapping sheared arm bolts was pretty quick for the type of repair it was
  • Look at bolt grades for high-load/stress bolts for next time
• Having two Pit Mentors was helpful (Andy stepped in at Houston to help Karly)
• Can relieve the other mentor, help students more
• Andy was helpful for the bumper repair
• Pit judging went well - Ibrahim
  • Clear and concise answers :D
  • Answered the questions that were asked (no rabbit trails)
• Overall, things went well in the pit - Karly
• Plan for changing the first arm went better than the planning for the second one (took off wrong tensioner for the direction that the arm needed to move in)
• Got better at anticipating problems and checking things before they become real issues (for things that we have seen before)
• Labeling toolbag Tools was very helpful
• Overpacked less than at previous events (yay!)

Things to improve/keep in mind

• Scouting chairs need to be taken out of the pit first thing in the morning every day
• Design bumpers to be more maintainable for bumper mounts (eliminate need to take apart the whole bumper)
• Need to get more tools (esp. wrenches, maybe some with built in ratchet wrenches)
• Need new hacksaw blades
• Newfound understanding of modular Pits (3015, 111 fieldside pit was very fast)
• Side thought: 118 uses grout sponges forIntake
• Make sure to physically manipulate parts of the robot during pre-match checks (manipulate is the key word - Karly)
• Make sure that pit crew communicates that checks have been done to non-pit crew people
  • Also communicate when it was checked/how recently
• The person who does a check for one particular part should be involved in the final say if that part is good or needs to be changed
• Make a list of the problems we had this season, what caused it, and how we fixed them More idle inspection would be good in downtime (in queue, in pit, etc.) beyond checklist items

Design

• Calculate torque on bolts to make sure they can withstand it, choose the appropriate bolt grade
• Could have put an insert in the tube to eliminate damage from over tightening, spread out the load
• FEA in Solidworks - Eden will be looking into this
• Focus on doing better packaging and designing for maintenance

Scouting & stands

• Saving seats is always really hard at worlds
• Maybe don’t bring pom poms to worlds?
• Was difficult to scout because of few people, people we had from other teams were not ideal for reliable data
• If we have to do it again, give them a better rundown of how it works/make app more intuitive if possible for auto/tele, a timer would be helpful in the app
• Best seats are at the back
• Being early in line was super important, being a few minutes later than that would not have been fun - Seb
• Didn’t have enough people to cover 6 rows - better to have 2 full rows than try to hold more rows and lose more seats
• Would be helpful for more people to know how to set up the scouting laptop scanning - would be better to have a desktop icon to launch it
• Sometimes tablets would set to the same team (eg. 2 red 3s)
• Would be nice to have better ways to share data besides running a USB stick
• Scouting website would be nice if we can get students who are interested in working on that
• Pulling from FIRST API was broken (docking, parks, etc.)

Strategy

• 254 whiteboard?
• Ibrahim didn’t have to be in too many places at once (yay)
• Teams were nice for the most part :D (other than 254 D:)
• Weren’t focused on RP, so fewer conflicts
• Strategy laptop is good

Drive team

• Made sure the field was working every match
• Red card was handled well (on our part)
• Dorothy did a good job of being human player, especially given the limited practice time
• Drive team communication was the best it had been, kept getting better
• Mistakes were corrected or improved
• Suggestion for team intro before elims matches to do sign language for waffle - Christine
• Drive team handled not playing in elims well (even though it sucked)
• Brennan did a good job of guiding the alliance in elims
• High compliments from 111 about our team’s strategy as a whole
• Match review was good

Tags:WorldChampionshipsPitDriveteamTravelFoodstrategyscouting