[BBray_T1296]

Originally Posted by Chadfrom308

I know how you feel sometimes. It's not a bad thing, but sometimes challenges are too easy. I joined the Formula SAE team, which is a lot like robotics in many ways, but different and more difficult in a good way. I am sure your school has one, I would check it out. And since I am on Formula SAE, I get to use the machine shop for 'Formula SAE things only'

Anyways, story time.

We had to create a Lego NXT robot in our engineering 100 class, and that was fun, but also wayy to easy. We had to make one that followed a line (line sensor and a variant of a P-loop), pick up a ball, and put in in a bucket.

I ended up throwing away all the code, and used PID loops on both the drivetrain and the arm. I ended up doing all the work on the robot, but I didn't mind the least bit. And needless to say, our (my) robot was the best by far

And you can tell the FIRST robotics kids from the other (as one of the programmers on my team says) plebs (plebeians). The FIRST kids excel at pretty much everything.

In our MechE "100" class we had to do similar. Our robot had to follow a line on non-flat terrain, pick up some small PVC pipes, carry them through a tight tunnel, and dump them off. Our group (randomly assigned of course) consisted of entirely FRC and FTC alum by chance. We were given something like the last 5 weeks of the semester to build the robot (2x1hr classes per week). We finished on day 2, got our 100, and were done for the semester.