[wireties]

Our minibot is not particularly fast but is getting better. During Week 1 at Alamo, it tripped the sensor every time. But at the next event it will be lighter and faster (a design which we built before we shipped but had no time to test due to weather-related delays). After some complaints on Thursday, the few teams with really light and fast minibots got the referees to manually judge the minibot race. It seemed fair to us, those light minibots are great machines.

I want to point out a common engineering practice. If my company had to build a minibot that triggered the sensor EVERY time in order to get PAID, we would build something with a 2:1 margin for error - something that would under nominal conditions exert 8N of force.

And I think that minibots reversing direction too quickly may play a bigger role that we think. We may add a spring in the lever that depresses the switch in our newer design.