Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
The flip side of the coin is that many teams, for whatever reason (i.e. not fundraising enough) simply did not have a budget big enough to really work on minibots. I know we copied entirely because we wanted to have something vaguely competitive without sinking $60 every time we made any kind of mistake. We didn't budget for that and we certainly couldn't add that unexpected cost to our budget once the season began.
So basically, the teams that could afford to really participate in the minibot challenge didn't get to keep their advantage, and the teams that couldn't afford iterative design could either develop a substandard minibot or blindly copy others.
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We spent about $100 total and had the highest-scoring minibot at FLR. Sure, it wouldn't compete at Championship, and both 340 and 2053 had faster, but it was very, very consistent.
Instead of killing motors and buying loads and loads of new ones, we (a) bypassed the inductor once we'd burned them out and (b) put lower fuses in our electrical system. Then, when we finally had what we were happy with, we swapped out for COTS motors.