Blog 006

John Stushek, March 12th, 11 pm

This past weekend has been a long time in the making. Like, 25 years. Just Kidding.

But man, I had been thinking about it for so long. So many questions. What were our main problems last year? How can we fix those problems? How do we accommodate for the new contest goals? At what point have we spent too much money? How do we turn a general idea into a specific action? Have we considered all the little things that could go wrong? Is it even possible to know all the little things that could go wrong before those things happen? Do we care about beating EDT more, or UIUC? Should we even be thinking so grandly?

Wowzer dowzer, I can't stress enough how much easier it is to answer every single one of those questions after the contest than before. I'll be honest, we really didn't do very well, which was disappointing. I thought what we had put together was good, and that I had narrowed down what our potential problems would be. And, you know, it wasn't very satisfying to discover a new drive train problem at the beginning of almost every round, especially when it was the one part in our lab that never seemed to let us down. It lied to us!! haha

In our downtime, I was able to wander through enemy territory quite often, and to see them in action throughout all the rounds, and in all of it, it was very easy to see who was ready for the competition. Why are our parts spread across the floor? Why are so many people huddled around that robot? What is that burning smell? Granted, having replacement parts and on-the-fly ideas are a part of engineering, but I feel the heart of engineering lies in preparedness. Seeing your goal and knowing how to accomplish it. Leaving your backup system not in replacement parts, but in safety factors. Coming to the competition running, and never stopping. I think it applies for any engineering.

You could definitely say we failed in accomplishing our goal (duh. haha), but man did I have a lot of fun, and more importantly, man did I learn a lot. 9th place out of 17 didn't win anything, but we beat some other guys, and that left me feeling good enough. But I want to make special mention of EDT and how exciting it was to cheer for them. I didn't know I would feel that way until the competition, but once there, I couldn't help thinking "thats my UIC". Please don't hold it against me for stealing a tiny bit of credit simply for going to the same school. But looking at EDT's work, you could tell that robotics is truly their passion, and it showed with their first place win over the might big brother school of ours. I hope to have a robot that can pressure them some more next year, but for now it is nice to be able to remember and learn from their practices. And frames and drive systems, heh heh ;-)