[Gdeaver]

A direct drive mini-bot can give a minimalist design and most likely the fastest times. After looking at 118's design on the forum, we played with direct drive. After, some experimenting with direct drive I pushed our team away from direct drive. For us direct drive is a bad choice. Why? With direct drive any binding or accidents can lead to a smoked motor. We already have 8 carcasses laying around and this budget drain had to stop. With a little more metal we were able to design a friction drive using surgical tubing. Now if something goes wrong we shred a little piece of surgical tubing. 2 minutes per side to replace the tubing and the bot is going again. This also allows easy experimentation with the width of the rod wheels and pole tension. Even better it does not require precision machining. Our mini-bot is sub 2 seconds and weight is about 2.5 Lbs. The mini-bot turned out to be a beast of a problem and can be tamed in many ways. Now alignment and deployment is another beast of a problem. I hope teams are watching deployment offensive and defensive as the game evolves in the coming weeks.