Quote:
Originally Posted by mrnoble
Okay, so what am I missing? A lot of folks here are saying basically the same thing: don't be slavish. Fine. Bu,t we built our first WCD as an off season project a year ago and loved it; we are on our fourth WCD build right now. Is it wrong that we took inspiration from teams we admire (including 254)? Is it bad that we are planning on using this construction style for all future projects, barring some radical reinventing of the FRC game?
A far as vexpro gussets are concerned, that one is a no brainier. I actually contacted a company in Russia four years ago in hopes of buying exactly the product that Vex now produces. We have no welding capability, so riveting works for us.
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Not at all!
1. Off-season project: This indicates that you acknowledged that there were potentially variables or aspects of a WCD that you didn't fully understand, and that these caused an inheriant risk if you tried this out during build season. Building it during the offseason meant you wanted the opportunity to find out what these variables were, so that you could isolate and control them when you first built a WCD for competition use.
2. Iteration: You say that you're on your 4th WCD build. I'll go out on a limb and assume that it's not exactly the same as your first one. I'm sure you have tried to make improvements upon each design, and that these improvements are tailored towards your experiences with the drive and resources available to you. I'm sure that some of the details of your implementation are not exactly identical to that of 254.
Due to these, you've definitely gone through some sort of learning process and gained some lessons during your work on your WCD.
I'll explain my original post with an example of what I would recommend to avoid; I talked to a team during this season that wanted to improve their intake. Their solution was to plug in a 2nd monitor, pull up the best picture they could find of 1114s intake, and copy it as perfectly as they could given the information they had. While I'm a fan of doing anything you can within the rules to be as competitive as possible, I think that you lose out on a lot if you attack a problem with this approach. What I would recommend doing instead is building a quick prototype of the intake, figuring out all the critical aspects of it, and implementing it in your own team's construction style. While it might take a bit more time, you probably end up with a system that performs just as well, but is easier for you to manufacture and easier to integrate with your robot than a carbon copy. In addition, you learned a lot more than if you just copied everything you can see, including some tips and tricks that you could use on a future robot as well. Win-win.
Sure, you stole a concept from 254. But you took the time to implement it yourself and tailor some of the details to your liking, which IMO is where the real learning happens. You don't reinvent the wheel in the real world either; innovation is what drives engineering.