Alphalpha entered the mock competition in the middle of stage 3, with 4 motors and no plow. We programmed it so that it simply pushed our four balls, backed up, pushed our two balls and then went back and forth through the middle prisoner zone. However, because Andy moved Alphalpha while it was calibrating, Alphalpha traveled a crooked path scoring 0 points.

By Seeding, two days after the mock competition, Alphalpha acquired two more motors, a plow controlled by two servos, and a better drive straight code. Although these changes took us 40 hours each, with 27 hours being in lab straight, it was well worth it. We seeded 1st!! Alphalpha drove very straight getting thefour balls and then the two balls very consistently. We made it spin in the middle after it was done to get balls out of the prisoner zone. It only failed once, at the last game. It crashed into the wall. Luckily the other group also messed up and crashed into us, and magically we ended with one ball in the middle. The plow was useless throughout seeding. Since most people didn’t get their balls into prisoner zones we had nothing to plow out. Nevertheless, the plow was cool to keep.

Being 1st seed made us ecstatic, especially since we were all sleep deprived. However, because many evil groups saw our strategy and were thinking of ways to counter our strategy (how flattering huh?), we were at lab by 9 am the next day to improve Alphalpha one more time. Instead of only passively scoring our own balls into zones, after scoring our four balls, we made Alphalpha aim for the opponent’s two balls and throw them off the board before they could get to it. In addition, we made sure Alphalpha backed up going against the wall so that any missed balls of the four balls would be pushed into the corner. Alphalpha then scored our two balls while simultaneously throwing out the opponent’s balls in the prisoner zone. Afterwards, it went back to the corner, where it may have a leftover ball it missed earlier, and performed an awesome (plowed up the ball, backed up a little and threw it over its head).

This long strategy took a long time to perfect. And in my opinion, we did perfect it at about 4:45 pm. However, we later found out we were supposed to have a new Operating System installed and a time out after 60 seconds. This really messed up the drive-straight, and pretty much everything else. We spent another two hours debugging and eventually decided to stick with the old operating system.

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Being 1^st seed, we were against the Jengabot for the first round. Something went wrong and we only scored one zone.

Between rounds, we charged the batteries as much as we could. However, the outlets in 26-100 were all near the floor. We made sure Alphalpha was in sight as we charged him. After a while people started crowding around Alphalpha since it was right below the stage. Then this happened:

Mavis: I feel like someone’s going to step on our robot.

Andy: We should move it.

Mavis: Okay (get’s up)

(someone steps on it)

Mavis: Ahhhhhh! (runs to get the robot)

Andy and Lisa: OMG, why did he do that?

The guy who stepped on it broke off part of the robotic arm, but it seemed okay after we snapped it back on. Little did we know it would shut off on us in the middle of the second round (we think the guy loosened a connection when he stepped on it). Luckily, it did that after scoring one prisoner zone so we did not lose that round.

During the break between elimination rounds and finals, Kevin kindly let us test our robot on the board one more time. It ran very smoothly so we didn’t touch it.

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Many things went wrong during finals.

Our first match was against Triple Helix. Both of us scored and then unscored. It was incorrectly announced as a double loss but later corrected to a double win. 

Our second match was against Juggernaut. We loss scoring 0 zones because Alphalpha went towards our four balls crooked and he stopped moving before getting to the other two balls. However, he did throw out two of our opponent’s balls which was very exciting

Our third match was against Woot. After scoring four balls, Alphalpha backed up and turned to the middle to aim for our opponent’s ball. However, Woot’s strategy ended in aiming for the middle. Since Alphalpha had to find the middle black line with it’s IR sensors and then turn for the two balls, he ended up knocking Woot out of the middle, hitting Woot with Alphalpha’s plow, and scoring us a double win.

After this match, we really wanted to find out what was causing the robot to drive crooked as it has never done that on previous days. We found that OUR TIRES WERE EXPLODING. The rubberbands used to stuff the tires were slipping out on one side. Lisa whipped out her handy-dandy pliers and fixed the tires.

The next match was finally played on Aston’s board, which we felt (perhaps superstitiously) was better. We also had only practiced on Aston’s board beforehand so perhaps the alignment and slopes on that board was better. Despite the fact that our robot reset itself immediately after scoring four balls, we won that round.

We faced Dungbeetles in our last two matches. After both scoring 1 zone each, we crashed into each other, scoring yet another double win.

The last match, obviously a loss, was surprisingly the best match we had ever seen with Alphalpha. He was being a very good robot and threw balls THREEEEEE times, asking for screams and cheers from the audience. Alphalpha scored and then unscored two of the four balls. He then removed the opponent’s two balls preventing them from getting an extra zone. At this point, Dungbeetles had one zone and we had none. However hope was not lost since Alphalpha was headed back to remove Dungbeetles three balls and put in ours. Unfortunately we only removed one (cheers!) and scored one for them. It’s last move was to go to the corner for any balls left there, and sure enough we had one ball there and if we got that one in we would have tied them with a double win. Alphalpha picked it up, backed up and threw it over his head, into the zone (very loudddd cheers). However, the ball managed to roll back out.

We ended in the top 7 out of 46 teams, although, Alphalpha is still number 1 in our hearts. 

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