Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Curtis
The answer is build a robust mechanism or choose a robust strategy so that the density of the ball doesn't matter. Very large tolerances have been part of FIRST for quite some time, and I don't think it's a bad thing. As Gene Kranz said, "I don't care what it was designed to do... I care what it can do!" Picking up a deflated inner tube or scoring a broken moonrock might not be quite as glorious as returning three astronauts from deep space, but it is often a difference maker in close matches.
I'm curious what kind of math you plan on using to combat density differences? Will you weight each ball and adjust your mechanism accordingly? It has been my experience in FIRST that if you have to fiddle with it extensively to get it to work, you're probably better off with a more direct approach.
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We were going to get an average ball weight by weighing every ball we come in contact with. Not for our design, where density doesn't matter, but for other things, one example of which is our human players being able to pass balls over the middle bump when returning balls to the field. If we can find a ball with similar weight to the average weight, then we can use that to train our human players, and for other...secret uses our team has been working out.
