Houston Championships

Practice Matches

After a long break between our Week 5 competition at SVR and Houston, we created new mechanisms that needed to be attached to the robot and new code that needed to integrated into the existing code as well. As a result, we finished inspections later than expected, but we were able to attend our last practice match.

We discovered that our cameras were not functioning correctly, but we put that issue in the back burner because we had burnt one of our NEO motors after our climb rope got stuck in the wheels.

Qualifications: Day 1

Continuing to Day 1 of Qualifications, we struggled during our initial matches due to our dysfunctional cameras. And although our team had triple climb prepared, we were never able to fully showcase it.

Nonetheless, our team continued to work hard. In the stands, our team members also scouted, talking to other teams and recording information for the Iron Panthers!

Qualifications: Day 2

On day 2 of qualifications, the Iron Panthers fixed the camera issues. We did this by swapping our faulty Jetson with another one. Unfortunately, this Jetson also had an issue, it could not be turned off for more than 2 minutes, otherwise, there would be a cooldown time when the Jetson would not turn on again.

Nonetheless, with cameras back, our drive team was able to easily navigate our robot, and we rose to Rank 21 in the Newton division.

We were fortunate to have been able to replay two matches from Day 1, which allowed us to redo our earlier matches with functioning parts of the Mothership.

Alliance Selection & Eliminations

The Iron Panthers were part of the 1st seed alliance in the Newton division as second pick, working alongside 973 The Greybots, 1323 Madtown Robotics, and 4201 The Vitruvian Bots

The Iron Panthers took a defensive stance for our alliance. Thanks to coaching from Madtown and Greybots, we were able to solidify our strategy for defense. We also realized that although our cargo arm was made to withstand the pull of gravity, our high-speed collisions with the opposing alliance caused our cargo arm to extend outside of our frame perimeter, which resulted in penalties. To adjust, our programmers wrote code that fixed our arm positioning. With these changes, only caused 18 penalty points throughout our 8 games of Einstein.

Mass & Energy

After our Newton subdivision eliminations, our alliance headed to the fields of Mass & Energy as the Newton representatives. After a well-fought round robin, we ended with a 4-1 scoreline.

In our lost match, we found ourselves with a dead robot at the beginning of the match. Later on, we found that the disconnect was due to the slow destruction of our eboard caused by our frequent collisions with opposing alliance. With less support, jumping off of habitat level 2 caused our pneumatic air tank to fall and disconnect nearly all of the RoboRIO CAN connections. Thankfully, our pit crew made short work of it and we were able to continue winning our matches, giving up only 6 foul points.

Einstein - Grand Finals

The Einstein experience is one like no other. Competing on its stage is no different. Us, alongside our alliance members 973 The Greybots, 1323 Madtown Robotics, and 4201 The Vitruvian Bots played three hard-fought matches against the Turing alliance: 6986 PPT Bots, 254 The Cheesy Poofs , 3310 Black Hawk Robotics, and 948 NRG.

We are proud to be an integral part in making history with our alliance members. Back home, we are ecstatic to have not only brought home our first AND second blue banners ever, but to have them be Houston Subdivision and Einstein banners.

And to top it all off, we look forward to seeing Houston again next year.