Our beloved robot, “Snuffy” took a good swing at our annual Duluth competition this year! Qualification matches started a little rough on Friday morning, with a new species of code issue and some encoder problems. After trying to implement some of our “magic” shooting position code into our autonomous routines, we encountered a bug that caused our code to crash. Normally, you would be able to reboot this code, and the robot would just be out for a portion of the match. However, in our case, we also encountered a bug on the system side of things- a bug that didn’t allow our code to reboot. This meant that we went “rock mode”, and essentially played the role of a fancy statue for the remaining of our matches after a crash. 
We had another issue with encoders (sensors that tell us where our robot’s wheels are in relation to the field), causing it to be immensely difficult for our drivers to control the direction of the robot, but regardless we still cycled nicely. Despite these difficulties in our first few matches, we were coupled with some amazing partners and remained undefeated.
After a few code and encoder fixes- we were ready to roll, flying through our qualification matches. On our 9th and final qualification match, we were faced with a powerful alliance, we knew it would be tough. In autonomous, our alliance had shot into the speaker, but the scoring mechanism had been jammed. This meant that even though we had made the shots during the allotted time frame, they had been 
scored as if they had happened after the time. When the match concluded, our alliance had been scored as 10 points behind our opponents. We quickly sent members of our alliance up to the question box, to ask judges to review the match and ensure that our points were scored correctly. The judges were able to see the jamming of the speaker scoring mechanism and adjusted our points accordingly. We were still defeated, but only by one point! Here we finished our qualification matches 8-1, ranking number 6 out of 55 teams.
Then came the fun part- eliminations. After picking, we stood as the captain of Alliance 4, alongside our partners Team 5690 SubZero, and Team 2861 Infinity’s End. We did well in our first match against Alliance 5, but were stifled by defense in our second match against Alliance 1. Due to the nature of double elimination- Snuffy was still going. We did well in our 3rd match, defeating Alliance 6, and put on a beautiful winning show against Alliance 8. Our drivers worked hard to catch up, and overcame the talents of Alliance 8, by 1 point!! We owe this to Ari for his last-second park, bringing us to our final match of the competition. In this we faced Alliance 7, and ultimately succumbed to them, finishing this competition in a well-earned 3rd place overall.
Even then- we were still not done. As we were leaving the field from our losing match, heads hung high, a voice from our alliance partner rang out,“Guys! Come back, you won an award!”. Sure enough, we did. Team 2823 was honored with the award for autonomous, wowing the judges with our code. To this, we owe the programming team who has worked tirelessly to help get our robot moving- all by itself, and to every other person who has contributed to our amazing team, and our amazing robot!
Well, we’ve partied hard but there is much work to be done- catch us at the Minnesota 10,000 Lakes regional in a couple short weeks, or at the Minnesota State Competition in early May!