Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
It's all part of strategy - which is a huge part of FIRST.
One of our rookie teams had just enough knowledge to build a defensive toaster with a arm to drop the bridge. They were extremely proud that they consistently had one of the top balance scores.
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We were one of those teams as well (almost down to the letter, in fact I just had to check the Spyder app to make sure it wasn't us
). Being a 2nd year team with few resources in a small town in rural NC, we barely had enough money to do much else. I think the final total for the robot was 430-something dollars, including an axis cam we had to replace.
Due to a massive amount of overthinking things, we spent almost 3.5 weeks on design with most of that time wasted because we ultimately didn't have the resources or time to manage it. And then our sole programmer was grounded, with the result being that we the very first time we were able to drive the robot was our first match on the field. Despite all of this; only having an arm with no way to shoot baskets, having no driver practice whatsoever, finicky programming and fail-prone hardware, we still managed 17 seed out of 53 teams from a mixture of very reliable balancing and coopertition.
While I am glad that we managed to do as well as we did, I do think it reveals some weaknesses in the way FIRST handles balance overall.
Bot in the foreground:
https://picasaweb.google.com/1016099...67442407026626
(We are significantly better off this year, and we're definitely trying to make sure that never happens again)