My experience at the JPL competition was great. When I first arrived I thought that my team was screwed and that we were definitely going to lose because all the other projects seemed much more advanced. But after looking around and actually watching the other teams struggle I realized we would be fine. As we waited to go on stage in front of the judges I got pretty nervous, It hit me that 3 months of work all came down to this moment. We got called up and we set up our device, then Ben pulled the pin and instantly I saw that it was going to work. Although it was not the fastest working device, it was a device that we could depend on working each time. We placed 5th and we still are not sure if we will be competing at JPL, but if we do, we already have many modification to our device to improve the speed. Our design needs something to decrease the wobble time the PVC pipe has once it is on the platform. The time it takes to flip the pipe upright is very short, but for it to get to a complete stop is where we get most of our time added.
