Re: Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience
 

Now I'm wondering if we will see a <5 sec 20 point climb? Basically the elite frisbee shooters upping their 10 point climb to a 20, but be able to do it just as fast...I guess I imagined the teams that used the 2010 grab and flip method would implement that for a quick 20 points this year, but haven't seen anyone do it yet.

Has anyone seen an inside corner climber?

Re: Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience
 

191 climbed on the inside of the corner but only for 10 pts.
My guess is they'll try and make that a 30pt. climber (or 20 atleast) for champs.

Re: Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience
 

Team Hammond (71) has shown an inside corner climber this weekend at the Wisconsin Regional. They got to a Lever 2 climb (20 points) in the match that I saw today.

Re: Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience
 

Designing, re-designing, fretting, building, reconfiguring, testing, re-designing, re-testing, more fretting and worrying, breaking and fixing, tweaking, waiting for the right opportunity, ordering more parts, tweaking and testing, worrying, testing and tweaking, and then finally using it and having it work - quite quickly even + dumping at the top. WOOHOO! Now just keep practing, watching for loose hardware, improving technique, looking for tweaks, etc., etc.

Just another season in FIRST.

This year's climber was the most difficult thing we ever built. It completely took over our design/build/test/practice experience. I had my doubts it was the right thing to do or would ever be worth it. But seeing that thing at the top of the tower with four colored discs in the basket helps me forget about all the stress that lead up to it.

Re: Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience
 

We had the same situation. It was the most difficult thing we ever built.
It started on day 3 when we wanted "just" to climb (and dump).
In week 2 we had a design and started to build it, but we felt it wasn't good enough so in week 3 we changed the design completely to a new "simple" one.
In the mid of week 4 we had the climber ready. we started testing it, some things were tweaked , we had to adjust things and we found ourselves 2 days before shipping with an arm that works 1% of the times. We thought on our next steps and decided to ship the robot without the arm (Withholding allowence rule) and changed most of the design. 2 Weeks of building the new design passed and no climbing. 3 days before competition we changed the design and 6 hour before the practice day of the Israeli Regional the robot has climbed (2 am).

That season was really full of ups and down. "that idea is definitely going to work", "yes, it's going to work", "I have an idea that id fefinetely going to work".... that rutine(4 week of that rutine) was really depressing. We ended up with a beautiful climbing robot but the way was harsh. It was our most difficult season.

Re: Designing a climbing mechanism for 2013... a humbling experience
 

Now that we're done and we didn't climb for 30, the simplest our design ever got was a single stage elevator on a pivot, with both fixed and mobile hooks for the corner. We knew we wanted a corner climb from about day 2 or 3 because the colored discs are what made climbing worth it, and we didn't want to interfere with inside shooters.

The design could have been made one step simpler if instead of a rotary joint we had a fixed elevator with a piston to rotate the robot, but even then, designing corner hooks that are easy to line up with and work without interference just wasn't in the cards for us.