West coast invitational

This off-season FTC competition featured 14 teams, including some robots built by FRC teams just for this event. We’re super excited to share that we made it to the finals as the finalist alliance captain! It’s been a few years since we brought home a trophy for being the finalist alliance captain, so this achievement feels extra special.

Event Highlights

Field Coach Experience: Our trainee field coach had a blast being field coach at their first event. It was his first time as the alliance representative, and he loved talking strategy with new people. He hopes he will get to do it again in future competitions.

Competing and Collaborating: Playing against teams from Washington was really fun. We especially enjoyed teaming up with Wright Angle; we worked really well together in the finals.

Diverse Teams: A lot of the teams were off-season demo teams made up of students who usually compete in FRC. It was cool to see how they brought their FRC experience into this season’s game.

A big thanks to the event organizers for hosting such a fantastic competition and for inviting us to join. We can’t wait for more events and to continue connecting with the awesome robotics community!

BC League 5

League 5 is the final FIRST Tech Challenge league event in British Columbia, and it was a success! All of our team members at the workshop did an amazing job during practice and during scoring matches.

Beyonce didn’t have any mechanical issues, but it was clear that we need more driver practice.

Picture of our robot, Beyonce, in March 2021

As a part of Fair Play, we recorded all of our matches, available for everyone to see on YouTube.

We are all excited for Wednesday, the Virtual Pits with League Wrap-up. We’ll see how we did compared to other teams around British Columbia.

Scrimmage

Today we were invited to a Remote Scrimmage with High Definition and RoboEclipse.

High Definition has a carbon fibre drive train and can shoot quickly. They have a big arm for the wobble goal and collecting and shooting is done in a linear path.

Robo Eclipse 11138 has a really cool like triangular arm and lots of quick shooting.

We then played some matches. It was a little difficult getting the match up and started, but we managed to do it! Every other team seems to have the same struggles anyways; whether that was randomization or autonomous and it took the full 2 hours to get through all the teams. The lag on discord also made some matches harder to watch.

It was a fun day and chance to see more FTC people.

FIX IT is a Fair Play team

What is Fair Play?

Fair play is a new program for FIRST Tech Challenge teams It was started by Mark Eldeman to “provide encouragement (and maybe a bit of extra incentive) to “do the right thing.”

In order to be a Fair Play team, a team must be:

Honest
Transparent
As a team, take the Fair Play for FTC pledge

Fair Play teams will publish robot match videos with scores and encourage comments and feedback from other FTC teams. It’s a great way for all teams to get better at scoring their own robot matches this season.

For more information regarding the Fair Play initiative, please visit:
https://firstroboticsbc.org/ftc/fair-play/

Workshop – Create a Virtual Pit

On March 6, FIX IT hosted a workshop called “How to Create a Virtual Pit” for FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics teams. It was designed to help FTC teams with making a Virtual Pit, and potentially helping them with judging interviews. For this workshop, we invited two FTC teams from Washington, Team 3805 Atomic Robotics, and Team 417 S.K.I.D., to help with the presentation.

We covered what is a Virtual Pit, and how to plan for one. Half way through our presentation, Atomic Robotics and S.K.I.D. presented their Virtual Pits to give an example of a Virtual Pit. Then we moved on to topics like how to make the most out of visiting pits, the importance of asking questions, how to cope with technical difficulties, and additional tips.

Water Game, Water Game

Rather than waiting for FIRST to create a Water Game, FIX IT decided to go looking for their own Water Game!

The 34th Annual Slegg Building Material Build-a-Boat Competition was on July 1st, Canada Day, in Sydney, British Columbia. Teams (must have three people) have a maximum of $115 worth of materials donated by Slegg Building Materials to build their boat. We entered with two teams; FIX IT with Joel, Mythri and Duncan ( FIX IT alumni) and Water Game with Ines, Bijou and Linday (a friend).

We had 4 hours to build our boats from the materials. Both boats came together fairly quickly, even though they were very different designs. The real question was ‘had we used enough caulk and duct tape to make them water tight?’

It was an exciting opportunity, and a chance to try our carpentry skills which turned out to be a challenge. But both boats were finished in the four hours allowed.

There were about 10 boats in the race around Sydney harbour. Fortunately, Search and Rescue were onsite, which turned out to be a good thing when one of the other crews needed rescuing.

One of the FIX IT team boats launched well, and completed the course. The other boat, named Caulk Monster, had some launching issues. The team was pretty happy to have their boat float, though it wasn’t hydrodynamic and it didn’t go very far. It was water tight until they tipped and let the water in over the sides.

Bijou and Ines decided to have some fun and went for a swim so they could escort the other FIX IT boat as it crossed the finish line.

Everyone had a great time and learned something about boat building. Our coach hoped that it would end the Water Game talk, but we may just try it again next summer!