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Unread 24-01-2004, 11:06
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Petey Petey is offline
Strategy & Gaming
AKA: Chris Peterson
None #1073 (Team F.O.R.C.E.)
Team Role: Alumni
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Rookie Year: 2002
Location: Hollis-Brookline, NH
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Re: Where to buy Balls?

Quote:
Originally Posted by KenWittlief
welcome to the world of real engineering!

I think most teams got one of the right 13" balls in the kit - so no matter what other 13" balls you purchase, or end up with, make sure your ball collecting mechanisms are not hyper-dependant on the characteristics of the balls

I would say inflate what you got to 13" diameter, and use the one they came in the KOP as your golden sample. If your machine can work with the KOP ball, and with whatever other 13" balls you ended up with then you will have no problem at the events.

in fact, you will probablly do better than a team that had to fine tune and tweak their machine to get it to work exactly right with one type of ball only.

The balls at the events are going to get scuffed up, partially deflated - they wont all be exactly the same size or have the same flexibility

Plan for it!

Design your bot to be 'gracefull' not finicky :c)
But we accidentally popped the "golden" ball!


I'm not worried about our robot. You're right--if our robot is that finicky, we have a bigger problem than ball size.

The problem is human players. The definite discrepency in weight and probable discrepencies in bounce, trajectory, air resistance, etc., are ones that I'm not sure human players will be able to overcome.

And this doesn't answer the question that I originally came to this thread with:
Has anyone found a more durable ball than the "new" ball? Because we've already popped two even though we've smoothed down the tops of our mobile goal PVC pipes. These stiffer ones break very easily.

--Petey
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Team 1073 alumnus, now Admissions Officer at MIT.

Thanks to all those who have helped me through FIRST over the years.

Last edited by Petey : 24-01-2004 at 13:31.