Quote:
Originally Posted by LeelandS
I am hoping to find some input from teams who have made significant improvements (I'm not talking tweaking some software or a minor addition; I'm thinking of teams who have added whole new mechanisms or redesigns in the past) on the following subjects
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I know you are looking for instances of major changes to a machine throughout the season. But, one of the things that seperates the supposed "elite" teams from the rest of the pack is the willingness to not accept even minor issues with a machine.
At Champs, I watched teams come out match after match, having the same little issues of not being able to feed into their robot because of a poor hopper design...or not being able to pickup discs....or not using specific locations on the field to score from, or many other issues teams could have during a match.
I know that our team is not willing to continue to experience the same problem more than one time. As an example, when we miss fed a disc into the hopper, and it flipped into the shooter, we added a piece of lexan to block it from happening again. This didn't happend very often, but we were not willing to accept this as a part of the design and just live with it.
These little fixes add up....they save time in a match, where even 1 second counts.
From a major addition standpoint, we were not able to finsh installing our climber during the build season. After we were eliminated at Waterford, we added the remaining peieces and strung the cabling for it. We continued to work on it through Troy and into MSC, before it really started working well.