Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

1. Be able to effectively score the low goal. We could push the ball in when it was on the ground, but once the ball was in our bot it was difficult to expel it by means other than the shooter.
2. Faster, more robust pretension adjuster with greater range. I think our bot could probably human to human truss if we could crank the spring pretension up some more.
3. 2 ball hot auton. We have a pretty consistent one ball hot auton, and our bot can do a 2 ball in theory, but we haven't had time to implement it.
4. Be able to shoot the high goal from the low goal. Since we have on the fly pretension adjustment, and can adjust our release angle between matches we can probably do this if we find the right settings. This would have been useful for matches where we were playing finisher instead of trusser.
5. Goalie bar. We didn't think this would be worth it initially, but once teams started using webcam control for goalie bots in auton it was obvious that it could have been a great addition to our bot, and we probably had the weight for it.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

For reference, our robot was a low goal robot, had a one ball hot auto, and could catch every so often (slightly more by skill than by luck), given a good soft lob.

1. Get more replacement wheels. Our auto missed a couple of times because our wheels wore down and went less far during auto than we intended.

2. A goalie pole. I didn't see a single goalie pole at MARCMP, and it would have gone a long way towards bringing us further.

3. More reachable CRIO. Our robot always had some problems with dying every so often early in events. It would be nice to design for not dying.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Launch the ball with something with more surface area than our erratic catapult.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Would have done single speed drivetrain of about 18 FPS

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Change the intake roller gearing so that is is slower. They provide just barely enough force to pick up the balls as is.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

This isn't a change, but I wish myself and my team would've prototyped one or two wheeled shooters. That thought hadn't even crossed our minds as an effective way to shoot. But it evidently was, as 254 showed us all.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

SKYSTALKER but better

Enough said.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

-Faster catapult reset
-not having a variable hard stop
-able to shoot with intake in frame perimeter
-modified our side plate design because doing anything by the wheels or chain was a pain in the butt because we had c channel plates

Hex shaft for our thrower arm instead of standard rod. Would have solved so many of our problems that caused us to fail miserably at Peachtree

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Perhaps a shot into the high goal when positioned up against the low goal. Several strategy options open up given that ability. We saw the shot angle out of Barrage able to consistently put a ball into the high goal not only positioned up against the low goal, but up against another robot against the low goal as well.

Moreover, at Archimedes, I know a lot of us were very impressed when the eighth seed alliance used a strategy we had considered to take them to semis and almost to finals, where one robot would sit at the low goal the entire match and receive inbound passes from a human-player, shooting the ball into the high goal and putting up consistently high (300+ clean points) marks.

Imagine a long sweet-spot shot combined with a reverse-shot from the low goal so long range scores are possible, but if we get engaged in a pushing match, we can back out and pivot straight to the low goal, and score it for the full 40 points instead of settling for 31, plus we wouldn't have to turn to shove the collector into the low goal for the dump. Only problem is we have a tall back flap that gets in the way but we could always reinstall our shorter one.

Its nice to dream... eh? I bet we could add another mechanism with the 5 pounds for IRI... Then again, it would probably have to be made of neoprene or balsa wood to fit within weight constraints :p

And what else? The sky is the limit. Maybe a dual collector for three ball autonomous? Maybe add a gyro for super cool auto modes? Put the camera back on the robot? Notice those improvements all have to do with the autonomous period. I'm a programmer, what else would I want?

Probably the simplest improvement would be to add one of those driver precision flashlights, because they look sleek and seem useful for alignment. Even then, indicator LEDs that change based on our catapult state machine would be nice. We had those nearly operational earlier in the season!

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

- Made the changes that we did before our third district. (low goal dump/over the top kiss pass)
- Skip mecanum drive on a non-rectangular chassis. Getting pushed around the field isn't so fun.
- Got the camera/hot goal working earlier

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

We did. We regretted. You shouldn't.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Singles speed was just fine. 18fps, probably not. I think in a lot of cases it's more important to design for acceleration and time to distance than it is max speed.

For us: actually build two full robots. We swapped the manipulator arm every regional and it hurt our practice time and introduced more troubleshooting that was necessary. Would have been better to do it all the way (like we intended starting off).

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Can't say there's too much I'd want to change on our robot; I'm really happy with how we performed at CMP.
Maybe a short shot from the 1 pt box would be good.

But if there's one thing I'd request, it would be a magic gyro that doesn't screw up. We've lost matches due to gyro problems, and then our field-centric swerve drive doesn't behave.

Re: How Would You Change Your Robot
 

Can confirm, hex shafts are the way to go.