The team spent two days at the beginning of April competing in the first FIRST Tech Challenge New England Premier event at the Eastern States Exposition (“The Big E”) in Springfield, MA.

This event, similar in many ways to last year’s New England Regional event, was twice the size and fantastic to behold. While our team was specifically invited to this event, other teams earned their spot in their choice of Premier Events. Thus, we had teams coming from Alaska, Colorado, Florida, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Arizona, Delaware, Canada, and Khazakstan in addition to every state in New England.

Teams set up booths with information about their season and their robotics journeys, as well as giveaways. Ben did his best to collect something from every team, covering his t-shirt with pins and stickers. Some of the teams set up games in which to win a memento – Ben, Dhruv, and other team members did their parts and valiantly obtained even the most challenging prizes.

Meanwhile, our drivers relied on Monster beverages to keep up their strength; but on day two decided to stick to coffee. Too much caffeine produces a loss of delicate control of the gamepads, and makes it difficult to steady nerves!

Cordelia performed incredibly well. This season we avoided both bevel gears and chain drives, and the simplicity of the gearing made her chassis very reliable. We did, however, see some trouble with the claw servo, and had some ESD issues that interfered with the autonomous routine. The optical odometry sensor became less reliable as the competition went on, and next season we’re planning to try standard odometry pods to see if they’ll give us the precision we want with the reliability we need.

This was also the first multi-day competition we’d had. With the grueling match schedule, it wasn’t surprising to see that we were not the only team that had increasing wear-related issues as the matches wore on! Even the top teams had break-downs and emergency fixes – they just had fewer, and were more adept at getting them quickly fixed.

Even with the vexing breakdowns, all our team members kept up each others’ spirits and encouraged other teams as well! Miles made time to help the Khazak team with their autonomous routine, and the whole team volunteered to assist at every opportunity to lend parts, run errands, or just bring cheer.

Our fellow Vermont teams performed admirably. While every team had challenges, Vermont teams showed up full of Gracious Professionalism and worked to be their best.