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Unread 03-05-2012, 10:53
Craig Roys's Avatar
Craig Roys Craig Roys is offline
Coach - Team 1718
FRC #1718 (The Fighting Pi)
Team Role: Coach
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Rookie Year: 2001
Location: Armada, MI
Posts: 244
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Re: 2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared341 View Post
After lunch, however, the balls that were put out felt SIGNIFICANTLY different. Not only were they somewhat squishier, their surface texture was very different than what we had seen before. In fact, the balls felt a LOT like the balls our team had purchased directly from Gopher (without the FIRST logo) right after kickoff. We ended up ditching the manufacturer's balls simply because they handled so much differently from the FIRST-logo balls.

We and many other teams had difficulty handling the new balls. They stuck to each other and just about any other surface they touched like no other balls did. I observed or have heard about AT LEAST the following teams having some sort of jamming or shooting accuracy problems during Eliminations: 341, 987, 1986, 254, 1477, 330. The most common culprit was that balls would "climb" each other in conveyor systems, or not want to funnel from N-to-1 between intakes and feeder systems. In other cases, the increased "stickiness" of the balls caused them to drag significantly in single-file conveyors.

Were these balls from the same batch? I do not know, but I doubt it. If they were, perhaps they were stored in environmental conditions that changed the surface texture of the balls (FIRST really needs to invest in a game-piece humidor ). I just wish they would have introduced the balls earlier so that teams could have reacted.
We noticed the "climbing" during our last match of quals on Saturday morning...we pulled 2 balls off the alliance bridge and they came in right next to each other. When we tried to shoot they jammed up - normally we could fix this by reversing the rollers, but they just jammed in that direction too. It took us 30-45 seconds to finally de-jam them so we could shoot again. By then it was time to head to the coop bridge. It did seem they were more sticky or something.
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