Good day, good day.

Long time no see. I have been on a long hiatus, specifically for 6 months. I have been busy with the first year of high school, and I simply forgot to continue this blog. Whenever I do something robotics related, I rarely thought about writing another blog and would rather work on the robots themselves. After 6 months, I finally found some time to work on this blog. Oh boy, this is going to be a long one.

What happened during the 6 months?

On December 25, 2022 (Christmas), a tournament was held in Kyoto, with only teams from Kyoto participating, resulting in a smaller number of teams, including us. No matter the performance, as long as my team participated, we could join the Keijina tournament, so I wasn't so anxious about it. During the Kyoto tournament, one of my teammates accidentally broke the Arduino board of one of the robots while testing a program. Due to that, the robot couldn't have another program downloaded, and since we didn't have a spare board, we had to stick with the previously installed program. Unfortunately, the program had some errors, and the angel ring did not work as well as usual. However, the other robot's angel ring was still functional, and our team performed quite well, securing a nice 1st place. This outcome was expected because, excuse my disrespectful attitude but, the other teams weren't as strong as I had anticipated.

Fast forward a few weeks, around the beginning of January 2023 (I forgot the exact date), we participated in the Keijina tournament. We were well-prepared, having fixed the robot's program and brought spare parts that are vulnerable to damage, such as the Arduino board. This time, there were way more teams compared to the Kyoto tournament, including teams from other prefectures around Kyoto. Many of these teams had robots with advanced features like kickers, dribblers, and even programmed goalkeepers. Seeing these powerful robots lowered my self-esteem, and I didn't expect to be even in the top 3. However, contrary to my pessimistic expectations, we performed very well with a long winning streak. Unfortunately, it was broken in the very last match, and we ended up in second place. Reflecting on the tournament, we realized that we needed to change the switches of the robot. The small and hard-to-press switches sometimes caused our robots not to turn on properly at the start of matches, giving our opponents an easy advantage. Thankfully, we received news that we could participate in the country cup, which was scheduled for 3 months later. We began to think of ways to improve our robot, starting with changing the switch to a more user-friendly one. We also considered adding a kicker, but it didn't work out well due to space constraints inside the robot.

Fast forward a few months, and I was disappointed to find that our robot hadn't seen any major changes in the span of 3 months. Nonetheless, the country cup arrived, and it was held in Nagoya. The tournament ground was huge, with more than 70 teams participating. The level of competition was much higher, making even the robots I used to consider "strong" at Keijina seem like child's play. Additionally, to participate in the country cup, we had to create a poster showcasing our robots and team. I formatted the poster on Google Slides for visual appeal, and my teammates contributed to writing most of the content. Here is a screenshot of our digital poster:

I mean, compared to our last year’s poster, I think we improved a lot. Clearly there is more effort put into it, it is formatted better, it includes detailed descriptions, and it is just better in general. Doesnt mean this year’s poster is perfect by any means though.

(last year's photo [2022])

We managed to win most of our matches surprisingly, but with some draws and one defeat, we ended up in 14th place. Here is a photo of our robots during one of the battles. As you can see, my partner is waiting to press the switch (which we changed), as the match was about to begin. You can also see the opponent’s robot as well. Excuse the horrible camera work.

While it was an improvement from last year's 21st place, I had hoped to secure a spot in the top 10. Watching the matches featuring the strongest robots in the tournament gave me insights into what improvements our robots needed. We decided to add an OpenMV camera to help the robot detect its location on the game court, as well as a dribbler to maintain control of the ball and make accurate lunges toward the goal. We also planned to change the motors to more powerful and faster ones, use bigger wheels with better grip to prevent slipping and implement an attacker and goalkeeper system program. The attacker robot would chase the ball and try to score, while the goalkeeper robot would defend our goal. To improve our poster, we decided to add more details about our robots and drew inspiration from posters of other teams in the country cup. Finally, I would like to make the boots look a bit more professional, by making a normal handle. I mean, look at the robot on the left of the poster. It is literally three wooden pieces that are horribly aligned.

Currently, I am working on making our own wheels using a 3D printer, which I recently acquired (Ender 5 S1). Having our 3D printer allows me to accelerate the process of designing, printing, fixing, and reprinting the wheels, as it involves a lot of trial and error. I plan to write another blog about this experience in the near future, and it won't take as long as six months, I promise. Meanwhile, my two teammates are working on implementing an OpenMV camera using Python.

That is pretty much it for this blog. I am sorry for taking half a year to write another blog, and I promise I will post blogs way more often.

See you in another 6 months. Haha, I'm just kidding…

or am I?

Thanks for reading. Bye!!