[Alpha Beta]

Thanks everyone for the comments. The team was a bit nervous about trading out our old consistent sub-2 second with deployment minibot, but felt like this was an arms race we didn't want to be left out of.

what diameter are you running

I think we might all be curious about what each one found the optimum radius to be. For that to mean anything we would also have to share the weight of the minibot and how we minimized friction between the wheel shafts and the legal bearings. The strength of magnet and gap between it and the pole also played a role in optimizing the design. I think it is more fun for each team to come to their own conclusion on these numbers through experimental iterations. As you can imagine the wheel diameter is slightly bigger with this design than it was with our old one. Not as much as I first anticipated though.

(We also found that some tetrix motors are just plain faster than others. Our identical backup minibot seems to go slightly faster than our first. Hence, we are promoting it to 1st string.)

wow, i thought the one you had at Denver was fast. that thing is amazing.

The beauty of the new deployment system is that it uses the exact some release commands as the old one. 1 pneumatic cylinder to release the allignment device, and a second to release the minibot. We literally just have to bolt on the new system and hook up the exact same pressure lines. No change to the driver interface and no change to the code. We wanted to do this for Denver but we didn't have any with-holding allowance left.