A catastrophic failure nearly ended the Spartan’s season Saturday, Jan 31. However, with emergency programming and repairs they managed to finish in second place at the Missouri St. Louis South League Tournament.
The team entered the tournament ranked as the second seed. The competition was running smoothly until the control hub issue arose. This failure left the robot immobile and unable to perform its pre-programmed commands.
“That was a total system crash, and we’d never seen anything like it before,” robotics coach Eugene Bender said. “With everything completely failing and only minutes to spare, what they did was unbelievable.”
The failure happened during one of the preliminary matches and left the robot completely nonfunctional. With only 30 minutes until their next scheduled match, the team had to scramble to fix it.
“Our coding guy was furiously trying to whip together fresh new code, having nothing saved,” Senior Captain Evan Herring said. “Guys were running around to other teams, grabbing tools and wires we might need.”
With limited time remaining, they managed to obtain a new control hub from a neighboring team due to a First Tech Robotics rule, “Gracious Professionalism,” which encourages teams to assist one another in competition.
“Another team had an extra control hub and gave it to us,” Coach Bender said. “Basically, the guys removed the old one and then had to install the new control hub and get it all wired up while Nate is coding at the same time.”
After obtaining a new control hub, the team scrambled to install, program, and rewire it in time for their next match. With seconds left, they completed the installation, and the robot was ready to compete.
“In the span of probably 25 to 40 minutes, we managed to get that swapped out, rewired, reconfigured, and recoded, and were able to perform and end up with second place,” Herring said. “Considering how well we performed, I don’t think we could have done better.”
With their second-place finish at the tournament, they secured a bid to the Super Qualifier and will have one more final chance to make it to the State Championship.
“It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be really tough,” Coach Bender said. “Because we did so well, we got invited to the Super Qualifier, and we get another chance to go to state. So if we succeed there, we will get to go (to state).”
