Quote:
Originally Posted by Tobot
It would have been a more interesting engineering challenge if that were true. Team 1827 will contend that minibot speed is actually all about eliminating every gram that isn't mandated by the rules.
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Alan is absolutely correct. You will understand it when you get there. This isn't a meant to be insulting, just noting that it takes a lot of experimentation or very thorough design to not "luck" into a fast minibot.
Yes, weight is important, but so is frictions, traction (yes different), load distribution, and most important a matched gearing to the above parameters. When your gearing matches those, you get a very fast (maybe not 1 second, but fast none the less). We had 2 mini-bots of similar design, similar gearing, but one was significantly faster. Then we found and eliminated some scrub, and the slower one was significantly faster than the original fast one. After that, we got them both within 10% of each other with regards to run to run variability.
As JVN points out, iteration is often the key to incremental improvement. We tried approximately 5 "styles" of minibots before settling on an architecture that we liked. We have since gone through 7 different minibot chassis for this particular "style" of minibot. For those of you counting at home, that is around 12 minibots, and I hope to continue as i would like to revisit a completely different "style" that I am seeing get good results. It didn't have good results in Week 5, so we put it on the shelf to be revisited at a later date.