Spoon Wars was a pre-COVID tradition at CHAMPS Charter High School, where every senior was given a spoon and had to tag out another senior who wasn't holding their spoon. In my senior year, some students in robotics were hosting it so I decided to use Google Sheets to make scores more clear. Without this, scores are texted to a game master and they have to share what the scores are when they can. Now anyone can click this link and see scores.
Pancake was my team's first competitive robot of the VRC season Turning Point, my senior year of high school. This robot used a flywheel to shoot hard plastic balls at flags and could pick up and rotate caps to score them on poles.
Gort was my team's final competitive robot for the VRC season In the Zone. This robot is different from Geoffrey in that this robot would keep the mobile goal inside of the robot and stack cones internally.
At this point, we were qualified for the State Championship. We now had 3 months of no stress to build up a robot for States, and somehow my team and I built 8 robots in this time frame and only 1 worked which was Gort. This is a recap of the 7 robots that didn't end up working and why we decided to scrap it.
I believe showcasing failure is just as important as showcasing successes. Between Geoffrey and Gort there was a significant amount of failure, but the amount I learned from this process was invaluable. Without learning how much of a mistake it was building so many robots and not spending any time tuning I wouldn't have succeeded in any future projects here.
The rest of this blog post is the definition of "try it and see".
Geoffrey was one of my team's first competitive robots for the VRC season In the Zone, my junior year of high school. This robot was designed to pick up cones and place them on mobile goals, then lift the weighted mobile goal to place it inside a higher-scoring zone.
Rerun allows you to record robot movements and play them back during autonomous.
Core is a simple Minecraft Bukkit plugin with the goal of being a lightweight replacement for all the features of Essentials that I used in my servers.
Implemented features of Core included teleporting between players, feeding to full hunger, healing to full health, announcements on server join and leave, and changing game mode.