It's good to hear some teams are having slight setbacks and some seem a little ahead of schedule, I mean what would FIRST be without some good fun in discovering new things right?
As for team 1710, I'm a little skeptical on our bot design. But it is coming together much faster than had last year. The whole thing is kinda going up while being drawn in CAD so it's a little interesting seeing how things are put together as a programmer on the team, but none the less, I'm only worried that it functions to the team's expectations and hopefully get a good week's worth of practice.
I've also kinda worried how this year was going to work out considering our best mechanical team members were last year's, but it has progressed a much faster rate than last year, and I'll be able to implement many more sensors and testing devices to use on the bot if we wish. All said and done, we're easily twice as far as we were compared last year on the bot. (Last year I had about four days to test my programs and autonomous and figuring it all out making sure there were no faults. And only about a day and half of practice.)
Being the programmer on my team that was the first to successfully do autonomous has also put a great strain on me because they are asking now if we can do all these new sensors and ideas that they believe software can solve. And no doubt I'm sure we could get them all working in time, right now they are wanting cameras, ultrasonic, line sensors as a rpms reading device, gyros, and accelerometers. All of which I've never used or coded before, so its coming a burden to me. I've gotten some things to work, but not in the sense that they would want it. (Auto-targeting turret? Sure that would be nice. But it's kinda hard to do without some time with the bot.)
All said and done though. Hopefully our bot does atleast to the performance of our 2011 bot... I miss that thing
(scrapped for parts for our new one).
May every team and member have a fun and good rest of the build season!