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March 21-23:  FRC 840 San Francisco Regional

Join us at St. Ignatius College Preparatory to cheer on FRC 840

March 27-30: FRC 840 Contra Costa Regional

Join us at Pittsburg High School to cheer on FRC 840

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FTC 4345 played at their last competition, the Northern California regionals, on Feb. 22-23 at Newark Memorial High School. The team placed 15 out of the 24 teams that competed. NorCal is one of the most competitive regions due to the significant number of teams, and because Silicon Valley has several extremely diligent FTC teams.

The last time Aragon FTC had gone to regionals was in the 2022 season, when senior and Programming lead Rocco Lamberti was a freshman.

“It was great to see us really perform our best,” Lamberti said. “Like, the three wins that we had were really good, our bot really did well and performed well, and our drivers were really happy with it. [O]ur best performance was definitely in [teleoperation] … [which] was pretty comparable to most of the good teams in there.”

To prepare for the regional competition, some minor changes were made to the Beta bot, including replacing the drive train plates and tweaking the autonomous. However, many of the challenges that arose were impossible to predict, for example, the vibrations that caused a bolt to unscrew, and there were unfortunate accidents that led to a lower score than expected.

“[We] fell short … due to issues with our positional tracking for the non-driver controlled portion of the game,” Lamberti said. “Which led to inconsistencies with our autonomous code.”

In the majority of the matches, FTC did exceptionally well. Despite not reaching their goal of placing top fifty percent in the region, FTC members learned many things from the competition through interacting with other teams, watching their strategies, and learning through the ups and downs of our own games.

“It was really cool to see a bunch of the other teams that had developed bots and performed way better than us,” said Electrical lead Evelyn Chu (10). “[We got] inspiration for how we could have done better in robot design and how we can improve our system for next year.”

Though this marks the end of their competition season, FTC is looking ahead.

“I want to make sure that all the programming members get as much hands-on experience as possible,” Lamberti said. “[I focused] more on being a directing force and helping them when they're needed.”

As a result of the many expositions Outreach attends, opportunities like such arise.

“[At] an expo at an elementary school,” said Jackie Wong (10). “One of the moms … invited us to [tour Pixar], where she works.”

The tour took them through a museum of artwork featuring Pixar filmography, showcasing both familiar characters and new works in progress.

“I really enjoyed looking at the artwork because they had a lot of art on the walls for the new short, ‘Win or Lose,’” Wong said.  “And there was also a lot of art for the ‘Inside Out’ short they just came out with.”

The Outreach members were also given a glimpse at the process that goes on behind the scenes of these animated films.

“Walking around looking at all the art and character designs, and the process overall was really interesting,” said Lauren Pong (11). “The process to create projects is long and tedious. A lot of work is put into character and set designs, animating, planning and scripting.”

Outreach has already reached out to Pixar shortly after the tour, hoping to continue this connection by starting internships for Aragon Robotics members.

From Feb. 26-March 2, FRC 840 attended their first regional of the year in Orange County. The rookies were able to see, for the first time, how a full-scale FRC competition played out. For fabrication member Wells Cheng (9), the experience was similar to what he expected.

“The most exciting part was probably our qualification matches, just because it was the first match I saw,” Cheng said. “Everyone was so loud and spirited and I saw a couple of my friend’s teams.”

This year, the team attended the first week of regionals, making the short prep time an additional stress.

“There was much less time for us to prepare and test, and we also didn't have a practice field prior to going to the competition,” said software lead Kaitlyn Zee (11). “So a lot of the calibration was just done the practice match day, and we didn't really get many chances to drive the robot long distances and all that.”

The preparation for regionals extended much further than just the technical aspect.

“Obviously, Outreach … was phenomenal,” said Reet Bhatia (10). “They're amazing. They worked so hard…They were doing like Scoutreach, working on Enable, hosting expos, [and] hosting workshops.”

At the competition, members were able to interact with other teams through pit scouting, taking inspiration from both their technical and outreach aspects. For example, team 3473, Sprocket, had very strong outreach programs, while others were very technical, like 8033 Highlanders.

“I found lots of inspiration from how other teams added their Vision components, and I now have a pretty solid idea of how I want to implement Vision,” said Zee. “We're going to discuss more on how and when we want the driver experience to be integrated with the cameras and everything.”

Though the competition results weren’t anticipated, the team stuck together through each obstacle.

“After almost every single match, things were breaking or things were falling apart,”  Bhatia said.  “The speed, efficiency and level of urgency … [when] our leads came together to make sure that the robot was ready before the next match … was really inspiring to watch.”

Aside from the competition aspect, the weekend allowed the members to bond with one another.

“We played at least 100 rounds of exploding kittens, like on the bus at the hotel, in the morning on the way there, and at the competition,” Bhatia said. “Lots of card games, lots of poker. And I think it was a really good bonding experience for everyone.”

They look forward to competing at the San Francisco Regional from March 21-24.

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Newsletter Writers: Sophia Cheng, Julia Chang
Newsletter Editors: Ethan Tawn, Ellen Li