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Originally Posted by AdamHeard
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As a matter of fact, it's can be kind of hard to do that on a ballshifter. We are planning out a test WCD (again) this year, and we found it hard to integrate a ballshifter without having to make our own bearing blocks. We could add our own bearing blocks, but we wanted to try as much COTS as possible, so we're actually going with a WCP shifter for the chassis. But depending on the chassis, WCP or Vex is easy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by inkling16
I don't know of any teams that can just "slap on a shifter" without any substantial time commitment from their build team. Additionally, shifting necessitates both more coding time and more practice time for the drivers. Shifting is a tradeoff, just like every other part of the robot. No robot will instantly just become better if a shifter is just slapped onto it.
Maybe I am reading too much into your words asid, but it seems to me that you believe that every robot would instantly just be better if a shifter were used instead of a single-speed. On a team with infinite resources, this might be the case, but on my team at least, we always have to make tradeoffs in our designs, and we will likely not be using a shifting gearbox next year so that we can focus on other aspects of our robot.
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Shifting gearboxes do cost a lot of cash, as far as resources go. More coding, okay, more practice, okay. However, both of those can be done pre-season as long as you release the code for the shifting as open-source. Other things might be a higher priority, but if you have the money and pre-season time it definitely worth it.