Centrifuge

Why did 4322 pick 7415? Are they stupid?

I think most people who knew anything about robot performance would’ve predicted 4414 picking 254. I also think most people would be rather confused at our first pick.

So let’s talk about that story, because it was it basically defined how day 2 went.

Gambling

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We figured that our odds of making finals were pretty solid. Winning, however, was another matter.

When you’re staring down a contender for “greatest robot of all time” and 254 on A1, and your robot was built in the 2nd floor of a local church community room, your chances aren’t great. We figured if we wanted even a 1% chance of doing something extremely funny, we needed to pick for a high ceiling with a partner very willing to get up to some Absolute Nonsense.

The 7415 Pitch

Jaguar Robotics sponsored by Feit Electric checked off both “high ceiling” and “willing to do nonsense.”

After all:

• they had somehow managed to get into SoCal district finals from Alliance 6
• won Glendale from Alliance 2
• put up about 600 points when paired with us in Galileo
• were already up to Absolute Shenanigans at this event

They approached us the night after Day 1 suggesting it, and after thinking about it, we had a team discussion. After all, we really did mesh well with them as we had scouted with them in Galileo and talked to @Alon22 off and on ever since.

We ended up polling the team with a show of hands in a hotel room:

After all, our 2026 inseason had been nothing but taking obscene risks and seeing it play out. Why stop now?

The plan

The plan was simple. Pick 7415 first pick for the scoring ceiling and the inter-team dynamic. Then try and pick their 200 ball hopper-only B-bot to try and starve TidePoofs.

Trying to get the TickBot to last to A2 seemed like a challenge, but for most alliances the hope was that other teams who struggled on day 1 would get their robots going so they would be sensible lower-alliance picks over the TickBot.

After all, if your alliance had limited scoring throughput in the captain and first pick, picking for either raw 3rd bot offense or strong defense was likely higher ROI to try and 3v2 or 2v1 higher alliances with only two scoring robots.

And things were definitely pointing that way. On day 2, I asked how several teams’ robots were doing and if they needed help. Many of them had figured out it was a wiring issue that they had already managed to discover and fix, so day 2 was a lot better for them with a lot more consistently driving robots.

Together, we ended up labbing out backup 2nd picks (if we didn’t get the TickBot) and trying to predict alliance selection. The only real condition was that in at least one quals match the next day we got to see their A team drive the A robot (rather than the “tickbot”) to see if they still had some of the Galileo sauce.

But will it blend?

And so we went into day 2 with two qualification matches remaining. We faced both 7415a and 7415b and 6560’s tall defense bot in a 2v3, and hitting the needed 5 RP was not a guarantee. Mind you, our singular other partner was 254.

We were slightly worried about 254; as in their match beforehand their intake failed to deploy. We asked, they said they were gonna fix it, and we indeed saw them fix it. They found that as long as they didn’t try to stow the intake in teleop that it would all work fine, which it did.

The bigger problem, however, was 7415a. The heavy defense that was played in that quals match had dealt rather severe damage to their robot. They made some rush repairs but in the process ended up with their shooter CAN line dead in the last qualification match where they were trying to show off their abilities. They played some sick defense, though, but it made our choices a lot harder.

We began wondering “do we really want to do this?” 7415 was very understanding if we went the other way. It became a heated, painful topic internally. While we still trusted that 7415 would fix their robot, we didn’t have a ton of data to go off of in terms of scoring potential except for like one match at the end of Day 1 where they apparently ran their primary driver but without the primary drive coach.

Alliance Selection

Finally, we figured to take a temperature check on our other options, and so we asked around. Other potential partners seemed to be thinking more traditionally. A bit too traditionally, for our shenaniganful tastes.

So we decided to go all in. 7415 or bust.

Unfortunately, the tickbot got nabbed by A7, likely to help 8229B shoot without needing to reposition. So we landed on the next best option and got 5012, a notably strong defender, and 4 as a backup for their ability to score balls and the large size of their robot.

Hey, they work!

Our first match went really well. While 7415 wasn’t at 100% (they kept jamming when full with enough balls), we put up a solid 471. But we’d need to score more to even have a slight chance of taking down A1, so we went back to the pits and we worked to try and figure out the jams.

Begin Shenanigans

Our second playoff match was against 973’s alliance. We knew that 8005a had a shot blocker, but 7415 had a plan.

Based on the wording of the rules surrounding damage within frame perimeter, some rather important wands were attached to the sides of the shooters.

We told the opposing alliance about these wands because we didn’t want to win off of some G415 nonsense. They ended up focusing on pure scoring anyway so it didn’t really matter.

The match ran, but it ended up being way too close.

Between one of 7415’s scouts and one of our mentors, one of them said “I think we lost this one.” and the other said “I think we have this one.”

“Split the difference?” “Yeah.”

599 played some excellent bump defense, and we didn’t do a great job of screening the way for 7415. I guess we’ll have to watch more 2056 + 1114 at ONT DCMP.

Increase Shenanigans

After that match, I joked offhandedly,

Y’know? What if we like, made a shot blocker on 5012? Like take a polycarb flap and some rope and tie it to a shooter or intake motor or something idk

I didn’t expect anyone to take it seriously. But the next thing I know, students and mentors from 7415, 4322, and 5012 all gathered around to try and and make this a real thing.

The next match we played was against Tide, so we figured we were gonna lose. We played team 4 that match, who we lent some of our LYNK bumper skids to in order to help them go over bump.

…We lost. (Obviously). But by Match 13, it was ready. Maybe.

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The Match 13 Alliance 3 Rematch

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I will say, the game announcer’s reaction to the shot blocker was really funny. While it broke really quickly, it did really well for something made in 30 minutes from scratch.

We went in with more preparation. We positioned @Alon22’s brother Lior as 5012’s drive coach. This was his first time drive coaching and he, I cannot emphasize this enough, knocked it out of the park.

We noticed that 8005 would only shoot from a fixed distance from the hub, so when Lior shouted

8005!

Gryffingear would gun it towards their preferred scoring arc…and immediately after screwing with their shooting solution they sprinted to 973 as they were doing a trenchside shot to shove them under, effectively shot-blocking them with the trench itself. I swear the entire alliance felt significantly smarter with Lior in the box. I guess generational drive coaching runs in the family, huh?

We ended up taking a much more convincing win going into finals. But by Match 13, everyone on the team had zero regrets picking 7415 even if we had lost, because this whole thing was just so much fun. Especially for all the kids for which Tidal was the first event with the team!

Finals 1

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We lost lol. We still kept trying to iterate the shot blocker, much to the horror of the dumpers, but it never quite worked. That said, up until shift 3 we ended up neck and neck with TidePoofs. The odds were astronomically bad, but you can’t say we didn’t try!

Finals 2

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7415 finally broke, so they ran double defense. Much like a couple other finals series this year, we found ourselves the primary (and in this case only) scoring robot in our alliance zone against Einstein-level robots.

But at this point, we all knew that we had lost, so we decided to just have fun and go smack around TidePoofs defensively anyway and play it out.

Was it worth it?

Yeah! Obviously! Everyone on that alliance had a ton of fun. We had an absolute blast working with our whole alliance coming up with all sorts of off the wall Nonsense together.

There’s a lot I’m skimming over that I wish I could give justice to. I’ll leave that to everyone else to fill in.

Sure, at a district event, we would’ve likely made a more conservative pick. (7415’s strat team were like “yeah duh obviously”) But there’s no Championship qualification on the line at Tidal. And I think the team (and everyone else involved was much better off for it.

We have zero regrets for our choices.

See you at Beach Blitz.

A closeup of 1148 nearly tipping us:

Tidal Tumble

For the first time in 2026, team 4322 Clockwork from Orange, California sponsored by Boy Scouts of America, Christ Lutheran Church of Orange, the City of Orange Public Library Foundation, Foothill High School, BAE Systems, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Intuitive Foundation, California Filament, Gene Haas Foundation, Molex, StayLinked, Fabworks, Redux Robotics, and various family/friends, finally got a good match schedule.

And boy, did we capitalize on it.

Match Reliability

One of the biggest curses we suffered from in-season was that our robot would seemingly operate on a 5 match cycle. It would work great for 5 matches, then eat it for 5 matches, then work again for yet another 5 matches before breaking again.

However, by comparison, match reliability at Tidal was a nearly spotless record:

How not break?

Mechanically, our robot was more or less what we ran at Champs, except we ran TPU stub rollers on our intake and we had rewired our robot for Systemcore. A lot of teams were struggling with reliability at Tidal and based on my limited sampling of asking around, a lot of it seemed to boil down to wiring issues.

And the TPU stubs held up great, even under some really violent interactions and impacts to the intake. We actually disassembled our rollers at the end of the first day, and the stubs looked mint. In fact, it was the polycarbonate tubes that had cracked (as seen above), but at least those seemed to degrade over time rather than spontaneously explode.

What about Q29?

That particular back-left megatron had a habit of snapping off in like a dozen matches over the robot’s life, but this time it snapped off in a way that somehow managed to get stuck in the shooter and lathed off a chunk of the shooter wheel (that fortunately didn’t really matter). The debris, however, jammed the azimuth and the ensuing stressful repairs (involving detaching the turret shooter) ended up breaking the 3d printed turret cabling shelf, so we ran the next match with it taped down. (It only fell off in the last ~10-15 seconds at which point we had already won the match, so mission success.)

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But ranking high and locking in A2 captain was one thing. It was fun to have a robot that was performing at its peak closer to 90%+ of the time.

The real fun came in playoffs.