[boomergeek]

Any team that first worked on their own to try to design a minibot, understand the physics and math and the engineering specifications and then built it and experimented and refined it- has done great engineering instruction.- It's quite commendable and appropriate to spend long hours brainstorming and experimenting free from the din of other teams ideas.

In real engineering, when is not appropriate to understand the approaches of your competitors? In real engineering, customers don't want engineering teams that can just copy: they want a team that create ideas and throw away ideas and sometimes learn and improve from what they see from competitors. If you are heavily inspired from some other team's work, then spend the time to understand the physics and spend considerable time to improve on it versus just copying it.

We were not impressed by the reliability of the gearboxes: especially using the hubs directly on the wheels: after only a few times up the pole using about 10 lbs of normal force, the wobble seemed obvious that the gearboxes would not last a season's worth of stressful pole climbing.
The gearbox sounded inefficient and the speed of our pole climbs were approximately the same as those shown in the Kickoff video.
We saw smoke and lost a motor/gearbox that first week after we got the kit.
We lost a second motor on our bigger minibot (4.4 lbs) that uses the motor/gearbox after we got back from our first Regional.

It was partly the quest for reliability that led us to simplify and get rid of the gearbox. Less weight means less stress on the motors. Dynamometer results posted here on CD helped.

Is it good engineering not to network and know how good the competition is?

Because of the cross fertilization of ideas between teams, the robots at week 8 of competitions can be much stronger than those at the first week.
The question is: what should your team do with this wealth of information and ideas for solving the challenge? Should your team ignore it? Should your team understand how fast the competition is but not how?

These are not necessarily easy questions to answer.

Any mentor/volunteer willing to spend time and energy facilitating any of the physics lessons, the engineering design, the fabrication, or the testing, etc. is helping students immeasurably.

Many teams end up spending TOO much time redesigning their robot and school work or other aspects of life suffer. The key is balance and mutual respect.

Big ; little ; can't we all just get along?