701's First Practice Day
 

Had a lot of fun collecting boulders, practicing shooting, and damaging the moat and low bar. Some off camera stuff was portcullis lifting, CDF, ramparts, and rock wall.

It is possible that this robot may have a scaler. We have the design, but the question is whether or not the final robot will have weight for it.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Very nice work on the very inventive polycord work on the intake and holy power on the shooter Batman haha

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

:yikes: Great work. This is basically Storm's robot with pneumatic tires! Here it is. Do you have any vision system/processing? It might help line up those shots a little more easily.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Cool stuff. Gives me FOMO because of all of the snow closings around here :o

You'll want to add the cloth/weight bar to the low bar. Some snags are a p.i.t.a. to work through.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

What was your goal during this practice round? To score as quickly and efficiently as possible or are you still just getting a feel for the robot? It looks incredible either way!

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Looks good but I will second that you should add a cloth to the low bar. It snagged us up a couple of times.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Love the design. The ability to get some drive practice is huge in this game. Thanks for showing the raw footage instead of just the cleaned-up, everything is smooth version. This gives a truer impression on how hard it is to hit those defensive gaps from an angle at speed. I'm sure by the time we see this robot take the competition field the skill gained by the driver will make those gaps seem a mile wide.

It looks like the driver was taking all of their shots from a position that could be prone to defense. Was that a design choice, or will future practice sessions feature pulling back to the safety of the outer-works or locking physically into the batter for the shot?

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Cool, I especially like the intake. You guys went over the moat a lot in the video, but not much else, it looks like it can do the portcullis and low bar easily. Does it have trouble with any obstacles? Cool intake by the way.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

I was shown a picture of your robot yesterday. I was trying to figure out which team built it, and now I know. You have the beaver tail, and we have the buck tooth.

We plan to have vision on the robot. Right now we are working on a custom case for the camera internals since the stock case is practically unmountable. Our vision was our spy for the day. The only shots shown in this video that missed were at 1:53 3:25 and 3:40. All others made it. I was actually surprised at how well we shot so early into practicing.

The goal was to score quickly and do timed cycles and also get a feel for the robot. What you see is our different drive team candidates trying out the bot. Unfortunately our controllers weren't cooperating for some of the day.

If anyone were to know about snagging it would be us! We had the low bar cloth on there until our portcullis horns on the front of the intake tore through it in the first few minutes of practice! That's why our drivers were driving backwards through the low bar. We will eventually build the back bumper and practice with some intact fabric.

I'm fairly certain that this is not the area where we wish to shoot. There still needs to be adjustments on our angle. From earlier in the season we wanted to shoot from the batter and the outer works. I believe that this is still the plan.

Once the little horns on the front of the intake get under the portcullis, lifting it is cake. Lining up is the only hard part. The only obstacle we ever had big trouble with was the moat. That was what made us shorten the wheel base early in the season; to put the wheels closer together. We wanted to make sure that everyone trying out to drive could go over that defense.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Ok, thanks. Is there any plan for the drawbridge or sally port?

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Always great to see a CD7 implementation - a design that shows itself almost every year in many robots!

-Brando

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

This is actually a bit frustrating to me since nobody has built either of those defenses. It seems like there isn't much worry about it, regardless of asking the students to form an initiative to get those built. I hope our arms could reach the drawbridge and pull it down. I'll make sure that those defenses get built for practice sometime before our first competition!

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Ok, thanks. Probably last question :D : how long does it usually take to lift the portcullis from the time you drive up and stop to the time you start lifting? Thanks!

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

We only lifted the portcullis a couple times and from that I cannot give you any meaningful estimation of an average time. I can say that the lifting action itself--from being hooked onto the portcullis to lifting it above the robot--is less than a second or two based on what we tried yesterday. However, the lining up took a while and we had a couple spotters helping the driver.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Speaking from a similar experience I have to say making your climber do the drawbridge is a tad difficult.
Very nice robot! I love how you've incorporated a 4-wheel shooter while maintaining the 16"/14" limit.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

I had no idea this was an original ChiefDelphi design. I first saw it on Madtown's bot in 2012 at champs. Thanks for the trivia :D

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

Brando, you've got to warn me before showing me pics of old CD robots man. PTSD kicks in so hard sometimes I can't see for a bit there.

I loved this robot but, ugh, it was a Serial Ball Jammer.

Not the intake, that was beautiful and fine (though you do have to be sure you keep track of how many of those green bands you put on a roller. It is SO easy to forget that each green cord is 2-4lbs of force and with 13 loops we had 50-100lbs on those rollers. YIKES, get some good bearings on those shafts, ya'll.

Back to the Serial Ball Jammer, it was the lift system. We always had a reason why this or that time the system jammed. It was never the design. It was this tweak or that tweak or this unlucky break or that crazy situation. Never never never that the system was just a bad system for lifting balls as designed.

I think it wasn't until we were back in the hotel on Friday night at our 3rd Regional that year* that I spoke to the whole team and said the words, "We are Serial Ball Jammers." and we finally got serious about changing the lift design. Things were a lot better in Orlando once we made some significant improvements rather than playing round the edges.

Also... GET OFF MY LAWN!

Old Man, Dr. Joe J.

*It was at that competition that we discovered a weakness in the Beatty Beast that had the File Card Walking Beam that year (which lead to rule R6 by the way). They couldn't be STOPPED, but they COULD be SPUN!!! We kept them from being able to get the goals into their zone. Sadly, we should have kept this theory to ourselves and only used it at the Championships. With their weakness exposed, clever Team Hammond was able to make improvements to the Beatty Beast that prevented this spin move. Team Hammond and Rage (who basically won the final match on their own when the Beast broke in the finals) won it all that year. Ah well... ...that's how sports work...

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

We drew a lot of inspiration for this design from the KillerBees and Greybots 2012 bots. Great teams and some great robots each year.

After this first day of practicing, I must say that watching this year's game will have a bit of "NASCAR" mentality, like it or not. Robots catching air, rolling over, or otherwise getting messed up or stuck while crossing the defenses. Definitely entertaining to watch.

In our video you can see us crossing the moat a lot. Practice the defense that scares you the most. We practiced earlier with Ramparts, Rock Wall, Rough Terrain, and CDF. They aren't as bad as getting stuck on the moat, we're making sure that won't happen.

Re: 701's First Practice Day
 

NO WORDS FROM MR. LEE HAVE EVER BEEN WISER