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Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
In a very informal setting, i.e. CD, I wanted to collect some opinions on what teams feel the biggest obstacle to their design process is of the topics below:
Feel free to throw out any other issues you have. Thanks for the input. |
Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
Our biggest obstacle is prioritizing game functions. Part of that comes from being unable to accurately gauge the difficulty of certain functions.
To use Recycle Rush as an example, we vastly underestimated the capabilities of other teams and built a specialist robot because we felt that only "The 1%" would be able to reliably build capped stacks by themselves. |
Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
Organizing data across assemblies. I couldn't even tell you how much time I had to spend reintegrating parts with SolidWorks. Too many external references in assemblies causing all sorts of havoc trying to integrate an actual assembly. Combining that with top-down design being so advantageous, it's a nightmare. It got to the point to actually have an assembly that worked well, I had to open some assemblies in a certain order.
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Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
Unfortunately for most teams it's people.
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I don't know SW, but Creo lets you control (warn or outright prevent) the creation of external references. Also there is visibility into the references you have created. SW may have similar features, I don't know. Disclaimer - I work for PTC. |
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Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
Biggest obstacle hands down for me is waiting for information.
When you are designing for a static game it is really easy to come up with a game plan and run it when the rules don't change like in Chess you can try an opening against a bunch of different openings because the rules are static. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending upon my temper) FRC games are fluid and dynamic and the rules change. Once that happens then the game mechanics change, then designs and strategies for games need to be re analyzed. So the biggest obstacle for me when trying to design something is the resource and information gathering aspect. Maximum respect to the GDC for having a Q&A system, and for keeping regular updates but the fact that what is viable day 1 and what is viable day 21 can vastly differ throws a major wrench in the works. The biggest time sink I had this year was when the game first came out I was like "lol Ill just drop anchors into the step bins and pull them all into the auto zone for resource denial and multiple bin sets points." It was a simple really powerful opening to a match and it would dictate a lot of design rules. But I had to wait for the Q&A because I needed to know if multiple bin sets could exist. When the Q&A went live they said "yeah no, one set" and also someone caught the technicality I found where the landfill zone was an area and the GDC made it into a volume and I was really sad... TL:DR The games tendency to change is the biggest obstacle |
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Do this and you will do much much better. You can't do better if you don't have a way to do it. |
Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
Our problem tends to be going from idea to design. Most of the team have great ideas with no clue how to design them.
We also struggle with the team members that argue "your idea is to difficult to do, so we do it my way" followed by an occurrence of my first issue, idea -> design struggles. |
Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
The biggest problem my team faced this past year was over complication. We ended up running very short on time because our complex parts took a long time to machine. I think often something can look really great in the CAD model, but it's worthless if you don't actually have the resources to create it within a reasonable amount of time.
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If the team buys in to a specific culture and design and goals, you are a thousand times more likely to succeed than if people don't buy in and don't cooperate. "A [FIRST Team] divided against itself cannot stand." Paraphrased from Abe Lincoln |
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Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
I would say on my team the biggest obstacle we encounter every year is sticking to our design parameters. At the beginning of the season, like most teams, we meet and discuss what part of the game we think is most important, and we brainstorm possible ways to play the game. However, after a little bit of prototyping and ordering some parts, we often forget what we decided we would focus on and begin working on other mechanisms we deemed less worthy of our time. Since we are a small team with limited resources, we often don't have a CAD team to design a robot before it's built or enough resources to play the entire game (rather than just play one part of it).
For example, in 2014 we decided that being able to pick up the ball off the floor was more important than being able to shoot or truss it. But after the first week, our head of the manipulator team started designing a launcher, before we even had an idea of how to pick up the ball. In the end of build, we had a robot with a catapult that could fire okay, but no pick-up mechanism, meaning our catapult was useless. Furthermore, the catapult was designed in a way that adding a pick-up mechanism was virtually impossible without completely rebuilding the robot, a task we could not do. We ended up only playing defense for the entire season, and it was the worst season for my team in recent memory. Thankfully, last year (2015 season) we made more of a point to stick to our original design priorities and we had our best season since our founding in 1999. In ancient literature, the hero's flaws can almost always be attributed to forgetfulness. Aeneas forgetting his need found Rome, Odysseus's forgetting to leave Circe, Theseus forgetting to raise the white sails, and many more examples. And forgetfulness still plagues us today. It's almost like they were trying to tell us something. |
Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
The biggest challenges my team faced was managing the part files. We ended up bringing a router and a NAS drive to the meetings This way all of the CAD team members could work on the part files. It would be nice if there was a cleaner way to do this as setting up a router and everything before each meeting is kind of clunky.
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Re: Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design
For most teams (and most companies) the biggest obstacle is talent. Too often we like to forget that it takes an insane amount of hard work to even have a chance to overcome raw talent.
At the end of the day, some people have it and many people do not. The challenge for team leaders is identifying talent early and nurturing it. This is not to say a team should discourage people that may not have the natural talent, but if you have a student(s) on your team that has/have the talent then you have a significant advantage over other teams if you take advantage of it. |
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