It is always a big issue with our team how many aspects of the game we shoudl tackle (as I'm sure it is with every team) and every year we try to do
Everything. And after it is all over we argue that we should have just done "insert important aspect here" instead. This year we knew we needed Two goal grabbers, at one point someone said "well we can take off one to put the extension on (because of weight)" and we all shot him down. We knew we were going to need power, lots of power. Now between last year and two years ago we became really good at ball handling and building extender arms. Last year we grabbed a big ball with an articulating arm and the extension worked next to perfect, and two years ago we had a basket that went up and down. So it was an obvious decision for us to make a basket to put balls in. I had an awesome idea for being able to hold a goal and collect balls at the same time , and then being able to get another goal, but we all realized how ridicoulously heavy it would be, so we dumped the idea of picking up balls, and we fell back on our strategy of two years ago with getting them into the basket from the player station. Yesterday we altered the program and now we have shaved about 3 seconds off of the ball loading process (made the extender go up faster) and about another 5 seconds off the actual dump process (all automatic). The tether is another issue that we all had great ideas on, including a mouse bot, airplaines, something like a snake in a can, pnuematic ball launcher, or the most recent, putting our bot into "Double Secret Override Mode" (which listens to NO limit switches) and lauching our basket across the field
My point being, somtimes you can do some things with a lot less risk, and a lot less mechanism then other things (Getting balls from player station VS. the field) and yes I know that there are 40 balls on the field versus the 10 behind the players station, but other bots can stop you from getting the ones on the field, not so with the Player Station,
Good Luck Everyone!
oh oh oh I almost forgot the point of this thread, if we were to redo it, we would make everything LESS durable, we made our bot WAAAAAYYYY too sturdy and "ROBUST", if we didn't waste so much weight on the drive system and base we could have made a few other features a little bit better.