Quote:
Originally Posted by thatprogrammer
FIRST (  ) of all, thanks for releasing these! The tech binder is just beautifully made! I had some questions though.
1. It's mentioned your drive train was designed for sudden bursts of acceleration, but you're geared for 20 fps+. Why was such a high speed chosen over a lower speed that would have accelerated faster?
2. You had quite a bit of motors and pistons on the robot, how was your battery life?
3.I recall you experimented with alternate material for bumpers this year, how did they hold up?
4. No recipes in the build blog? Has the lack of free corndogs doomed us all? |
1. In order to have both high acceleration and top speed, we chose to have 6 CIMs. We didn't want to sacrifice a high top speed, especially on a field as open as Aerial Assist. Also, one of our initial strategies in Quals was to go for 1-assists with solo-catching, and thus a high top speed would be very advantageous.
2. The 6 CIMs on the drivetrain were the biggest power draw. The only problems we had were when we tried to push other robots while in low gear, sometimes the breaker would trip. We would obviously replace batteries between every match, and we also purchased some fresh batteries before Champs because the 12 we'd been using for regionals were starting to die.
3. We didn't too much experimentation ourselves with bumper material, but we looked at what 971 and other teams did and tried to improve upon it. We used Cordura bumpers for the first 2 regionals and then switched to Sailcloth bumpers after that. The new bumpers had a coefficient of friction as low as .2 (compared to Cordura's .4 I think). They helped with driving around defense immensely and the material held up pretty well. The biggest problem with the new bumpers was that we ironed on the numbers instead of sewing, and thus sometimes the numbers would bubble up or rub off.
4. I don't recall how many times baked things for the lab, he could answer the questions better than myself. However, one night we did make s'mores using a heat gun. It was awesome!