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Originally Posted by GeeTwo
The actuality was that most of our matches seemed to devolve into one robot on offense and two on defense on both sides; no assist points, and few truss shots.
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I only recall one time where we had to chase a wayward auto ball for more than a few seconds.
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And even a box on wheels should be able to a score a low goal auto pretty consistently.
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Interesting that your experience with AA was entirely the opposite of mine. What I saw was teams all contributing in some way offensively, then contributing in some way defensively when they completed their offensive job for that cycle. What I also saw was teams doing their best at every level of play to keep opposing alliance members away from their auto balls. (see: Crossroads, Einstein finals, IRI) I also saw lots of boxes getting caught on walls, or just not moving at all in auto.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
I do not consider canburgling as an auto task, but I can see the point - it was a scarce worm that went to the early bird. The two reasons not were that it was not rewarded directly because it was autonomous, and (more importantly) most of the canburglar programming was a single actuator with no sensor feedback. That is, it was best solved as a mechanical problem, not an automation problem.
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Having worked with 548's brutal can pullers, I can attest to the fact that the fastest (or at least some of the fastest) did use sensors. A potentiometer was used do detect when the pullers were all the way down, so they would move forward as fast as possible.
As for the quality and complexity of FRC code, I think we can all agree it'd be great to teach great programming. It'd also be great if more teams actually did great programming. Yet, ultimately, we have the kind of hardware that allows us to be sloppy, libraries that are poorly made themselves, and generally diminishing returns for making code more efficient. Great code can be made in FRC and it can have good returns, but unless you have everything else about your robot down to laser-precise perfection, there's probably something else that could be made better more easily, whose returns would scale better with the effort you put into it. For the sake of inspiration, have at it because programming is vital to our future generation of engineers. However, for the sake of making a consistently successful team, there is often something that will give greater returns for less effort.