by Lyra Summers and John Paul Jenkins
On October 20th, The RoboBees attended the 18th Annual Battle O’ Baltimore in Glenelg, Maryland. The Battle of Baltimore 2024 was the team’s last off-season event for the 2024 FRC season. This event also marked the final competition for their robot, Growler. Growler is a beloved robot that served the team well. The team hopes to improve even further than they already have for the upcoming season.
During this event, the team was overall extremely successful. However, there were many issues along the way. In the end, the team prevailed and it is important to look at these issues as obstacles our team overcame and most importantly they learned from.
To go more in-depth about the issues the team encountered, they experienced issues with the CAN bus and an issue with the shooter. The CAN bus was the biggest issue that they experienced out of these two issues. The issue with the CAN bus was the result of a wire that was too short and became unplugged during a match. On top of all this, they also fixed the issues the team faced at the CRI event. During CRI the team was having issues with the swerve modules. These ended up being fixed during the Battle O’ Baltimore event.
Our team overcame them by fixing the wiring. The issue with the shooter was also caused by the wiring since a wire on the shooter accidentally got flipped incorrectly. They just ended up as an AMP-only bot for that match. Other than those issues the team encountered no further issues and the team did quite well. The team was thankful to work with the wonderful teams we had on our alliance and secure victory with them. That is why some students expressed that the alliance selection was one of the best and most notable parts.
What the team wants to improve in the future is to have longer wires and ensure we won’t experience these issues during an actual season competition. If we do experience these issues again we want to handle them immediately and ensure we do not miss a match like we ended up having to do at this event. During our team’s time preparing for the upcoming season, we will teach the new students how to resolve these issues. Overall in this event, the new students performed very well. Since this was the last off-season before the new season. The Battle O’ Baltimore event gave new students who didn’t get to experience CRI a chance to experience an off-season event. In the end, our team, the Robo Bees, was delighted to attend this event.
