Quote:
Originally Posted by bEdhEd
If you're going to have a robot that loads from the top from the hoppers, then you might as well make a little bit of space available for a ball intake. What ideas have your team come up with for that so far? Are there images or videos you have already found from which you can draw inspiration?
We're going for a top loading and floor intake.
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We've been keeping up with Ri3D, and our original plan was to have a belt/elevator style intake like some of those bots. I think the issue is less a lack of ideas and more that we haven't started prototyping an intake yet. We've lost a bit of mechanical expertise over the past couple years and worried that if we spread out too thin, we could end up with an entire fuel-scoring system that doesn't work well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cothron Theiss
I think a floor intake is absolutely essential for teams that want to be successful high goal shooters. However, you've already said that Gears and climbing are your priorities, NOT high goal shooting. If you are building mechanisms to retrieve and place Gears, a climbing mechanism, a high goal shooter, and a floor intake for Fuel, you will be effectively trying to build a robot that does everything. And as we see year after year, teams that try and do everything often fail to do any of the tasks well enough to set themselves apart. I think this'll be especially true this year. Another trend that I've seen quite a bit this year is teams that come to the conclusion that Gears are worth more points than Fuel, make Gears their top priority, and then invest much more of their time, robot space, and resources into shooting high goals. The point I'm trying to make is, if you've set out to make a Gear and climbing robot, make the best Gear and climbing robot you can. Don't divest resources from your primary scoring objective to add on a tertiary or quaternary capability.
Now, if you team feels strongly that you can add on a floor intake without detracting from the performance of your primary objectives, go for it! But this is an ever-present trap in FRC, and it catches many teams every year.
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^this. It seems likely that lots of teams will claim to prioritize gears/rope this year, decide that those mechanisms are fairly mechanically simple, focus on shooting, and then run into bugs later in the season that keep their "priorities" from working smoothly. Having to rely on hoppers or driving across the field for fuel during the match still makes me nervous, but hopefully our shooter will be able to just help us finish off the 40 kPa and score a few more match points when needed, and we won't have to rely on it as a main strategy.