Quote:
Originally Posted by Donut
Good job on getting a running chassis already! Just adding a single arm to dump discs in the low goal to that robot will put you ahead of about 80% of rookie robots and a chunk of veteran teams as well.
You can never be done too early for more testing and practice!
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Let me just emphsize this for a second:
Practice, for you guys, will be something that can very easily set you apart from many other teams at competition.
Going for some complex system, as a rookie team, will probably not be the best course of action. As a rookie, every team lacks resources. Tools and parts. Both of these things put a damper on what you can create and how fast you can do it. At least for us its quite frustrating to want to prototype something and not have the parts to do so!
Anyway, (And this is just advice
) evaluate your resources and capabilities
honestly. Nothing good will come of you guys trying to focus on doing everything in this game at the top notch level. Something that alot of rookies miss is that being a defense bot is ok!
If you were a robot last year that could stop the opposing alliance's inbounder from getting balls to the opposing alliance's half of the field, you would have been a pretty solid 3rd pick for many alliances. Add the ability to balance on top of that (Which isnt that hard to add) and you have a fairly affective robot on your hands. All is very easy to make, just make your robot with a large wall on it and the ability to drive at a fair pace and boom! there you go!
What im getting to is that practice is SUPER important. Defense can be really affective, and it probably wont be that hard to block a lot of teams shots with a 60" tall robot, epically if you can drive really well! Even if the alliance has to turn one of their robots on you to play anti-defense, you just took one of their robot our of play to stop you. Even if you dont completely shut them down, you're still stalling them. And points they dont score are the same as scoring the points offensively yourself (although some may think its less 'glamorous').
Does this mean you shouldnt attempt to build a shooter or a climber? No, not at all. Just strategize and have a backup plan if it doesnt work out, which will probably not be the case based on how quickly you guys have gotten yourselves together!
Its better to do one thing above average than a bunch of things poorly.
Just some stuff to think about IMHO. With a little strategy (and practice!), basic robots like I described above can still be very effective.
Good luck to your team in your season! Its a whole lotta' fun
