Hello all!
I was thinking the other afternoon about design ideas and concepts for Get Over It this year, and I realized something:
FTC seems to ignore the rule of "Keep it simple, stupid (KISS)" and other "rules of thumb" that FRC teams follow.
When I was in FRC, simplicity was key to a solid, competitive robot, as it usually meant fewer things could break, less weight, lower cost, and less time spent designing/testing/building/fixing. Yet, as I look at the FTC robots for this year's game, very few of them were truly simple. A quick look at the robots of the Technoguards, Landroids, or Say Watt, and it seems the word "simple" is not the their vocabulary!
So here is my question for you all:
Does an emphasis on simplicity have a place in successful designs in FTC?
If not, why? Is it due to the longer build season? The kit parts? or is it just the complexity required by the game?
PS, feel free to share your design mantras and rules of thumb here.
