FIRST Competitions

After six weeks of the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into the fabrication of the robot, here is where it all pays off. The competitions run from early to late March each year, with the FIRST Championships in April. On the playing field, you are out to win, but gracious professionally. Off the field, you cooperate with the other teams. FIRST does not have long-standing rivalries like other sports, as a team may be your partner one match, but your opponent the next. And that is what gracious professionalism is. Learning to compete, but not violently, but then cooperate the rest of the time, to openly share ideas and concepts, to synergize together. This may should new and unique to rookies and newcomers, but this is what will fuel the industry of the future, competing while cooperating in an open and friendly environment.

Bash at the Beach (2005)

Bash at the Beach, the last competition of the year for Team 228 ended with a bang. Bash at the Beach, whose Hawaiian Party atmosphere was not dampened by the rain, was also the first competition for many of our team's new members. At Bash at the Beach, Team 228 ranked in 3rd place, had 9 wins and 5 losses, and ended as semifinalists. Even though a sprocket broke on our arm and a chain broke during two of our matches, we quickly fabricated fixes and sprang back. See the following links for more information.

For most of the early elimination rounds, Team 228 had little problems, and soon rose to the third ranking. But in the last elimination round, a bit of bad luck surfaced. Fatigue from a hard years worth of work caused a sprocket on the arm to shatter early in autonomous mode. Without this sprocket, the arm simply fell off the robot and was only kept on by pneumatics tubing.

But all was not lost. With some quick thinking from the Bengineer, we glued the shattered remains of the sprocket back together with Gorilla Glue and Loctite. Then, to keep the pieces in place, a hose clamp was wrapped around all of this. While all this is going on, the alliances for the elimination rounds are being called. Team 228 ended up with Teams 809 (Techno Wizards) and 839 (Rosie Robotics).

The arm fix was crude and definitely "ghetto-fab engineering" to say the least. We expected it to only last halfway into our next match, which was the quarterfinals. But as luck would have it, the arm held together for the entire first match of the quarterfinals. And then the second. And then the third. We had just won our way through the semifinals with an arm held onto our robot with glue that had yet to cure and a hose clamp.

Our arm wasn't our only breakage. During our second match in the quarterfinals, a tire hub (which held the main drive-train sprocket on) failed, rendering two of our six wheels useless. For that match, we were only able to score one tetra. But not to fear, for this was a simple fix. In less than 10 minutes, Gus was back in action for our next match, in which we triumphantly won the quarterfinals.

In the semifinals, things got a little tougher. The arm, which survived the semifinals, was beginning to show signs of distress. The sprocket continued to hold together, but it "wobbled" more and more. Despite a hard struggle, the third alliance - comprised of Teams 228, 809 and 839 - lost to the eventual finalists - Teams 155, 1027, and 500.

‹‹ Go back to the 2005 FIRST Competitions page.