Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

If you only pick up off the floor in autonomous, then you can get away with a 1986 spatula design. If picking up off the floor is your primary source of frisbees you need an active pickup like 2056, 254, etc.

Using a spatulatesg manipulator can be used in teleop however it is an extremely hard and inefficient way of collecting discs.

Whatever your primary source of collecting game pieces is it should be quick and guarantee control of the game piece. KISS is a good practice to follow but sometimes stupidly simple is too simple and too ineffective.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

I understand why active control is good. I wanted to know the particulars of why Sisk thought RoboKong needed active pickup.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

For 2495 we probably could have tried a wider intake mechanism that funnels at the top instead of a single width intake. It would resemble 1538/33's bots.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-e-a.akamaihd.n...94197621_n.jpg

versus

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphot...34357633_n.jpg

A custom spur gearbox probably would have been a good idea as well, but COTS did fine for what we needed.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

For our shoulder joint, attempting to go with a minimal reduction + counterbalance rather than reducing to the required design speed. Many of the issues we faced at our first district could have been solved with additional reduction to our shoulder joint (and were solved by implementing this at our second district). We had too many issues attempting to dial in the required power for our shoulder motor and our PID with the minimal reduction. Too low power to the motor meant too much stalling, and too high power meant too quick of motion for the PID to execute properly. And the non-constant force of surgical tubing as the counterbalance also presented significant issues. We rectified this by adding a second stage of reduction before our second district, and virtually all of these issues were solved.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Making strategy and design decisions before prototyping. One shouldn't assume shooting is hard, or that it's harder from some distances than others, without a shaky prototype or two under your belt. If we took some wheels and motors and built a rudimentary shooter in Week 1, we'd have known that much earlier that shooting isn't impossible.

I wish we had abandoned climbing a week earlier. If we had three more days in the shop we could have averaged 36+ ppm at BAE.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

1) Our ground speed (10 fps with a non-shifting gearbox) was too slow. We had more control than we needed for alignment, and not enough speed to get around defense. Pushing wasn't as important as we expected.

2) Cable drive (climber) without "keepers" to prevent cables from coming off the pulleys when tension was lost.

On the other hand, we violated one of our normal rules and it proved NOT to be a mistake: We relied on gravity rather than active control to move, stack, and index the game pieces in the robot.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Don't assume that the challenge is harder than it is, and skip over "it can't be that straightforward, can it?" solutions.

Don't do things that you don't have the money to do.

Don't assume that when you get the manufacturing resources of "powerhouses" that you will then have an easy build season, if anything it was more demanding than ever.

When a little voice in your head tells you "there's too much stuff in this robot" around week 2, listen to it.

And a personal one, don't say "yes" to as many things as I did when you're going to be busier during build than you've ever been in your life.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Recruit and train early. New members are much more likely to be functional during build season if they already have experience with team activities.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

We have words like that on 2614, including "Mecanuum" and "scissor lift."

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

One mistake of our team was us mentors getting burned out trying to figure out a floor pickup system instead of investing those hours improving our loading and shooter on a perfectly capable cycling machine. If we had spent those hours we burned away on a floor pickup on improving our loader and shooter, we likely would have walked away with a blue banner or two this season.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Deciding to do all the aspects of the game. We underestimated the importance of an extremely accurate shooter and instead spent lots of time on a 30 point climber that sometimes, at its best, went to 10. Here's a link to our robot's info page : http://www.team708.org/current-robot.html By the way, at our most recent off season, Monty Madness, we took off the climber (after the event was over.) We hope to build a ten point climber by our next off season event MidKnight Mayhem.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Trouble shooting inconsistancies in our shooting. Our floor pick up was awesome but we failed to correctly diagnose problems with our disc delivery "bucket" that lifted them into the shooter mechanism. The inconsistent lift of this device lead to inconsistent shooting and jamming in the later season. We thought we had it several times but it would return after a match or two of minimal problems.

The unlikely source, an intermitant pneumatic cylinder. We have used cylinders on all our robots since 2010 and never had problems but these were long stroke with a "dainty" rod diameter.

The good leason, aquire game pieces and shoot quickly. Shooting 70% of 16 discs is better than shooting 95% of 8 discs.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Funny, I think that if we'd have spent the hours developing a floor pickup system instead of a 30-point climber, we'd have walked away with one or two blue banners this year. :)

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Not having a solution for upside down Frisbees in your hopper before you get to Champs. Of course we lose our first match by 2 points with an upside Frisbee in our hopper. Then at the end of the weekend you realize you missed out on a 8-0 record and #1 seed because of the dreaded upside down Frisbee in your first match. But you can't change the past so just keep moving forward.

Turns out 1 self-tapping screw was the solution.

Re: Mistakes of 2013
 

Our entire design process. "Let's split into groups and the best idea of the group wins! You have 5 minutes. Go!"

That and deciding on day 1 not to do a climber because we didn't have any ideas right off the bat.

Um...not making a CAD model of the robot before building it...again. :o