Quote:
Originally Posted by bkahl
Seriously?
There is a reason Mike Corsetto says "Steal from the best, invent the rest" in every post asking why 1678 is so good.
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Exactly, we do just that by copying designs other teams have used for custom wheels modifying as needed and making them for our robots. We also have an internal saying that we should only "build what we know" where we only build stuff we have built before and know the fine details of or are sufficiently confident we can pull off. We make that list longer in the off season by doing projects EXACTLY like this. We would have had pretty crappy bots if we hadn't first learned ourselves how to build an elevator off season 2014 and an articulated arm in off season 2015. A drivetrain is the SOUL of your robot, and a badly implemented drivetrain is the single quickest way to to have a shorter competition season.
"I have never built a WCD before and don't feel comfortable switching to this different type of design, so we are building one this off season so we don't make stupid mistakes this coming build season."
We used custom traction wheels in 2013 and 2014 because it mattered. In 2015 there was near zero reason for that level of traction so we ran colson. In 2016 we ran pneumatic and colson because we knew that the custom wheels would not provide the durability needed to survive the game. All those decisions were based off of prior experience, personal or leveraged from the community.