[Rickertsen2]

How did you feel about this year's robot? What isn't finished? What are its strengths? Weeknesses?

Me.. Its my final year FIRST as a high school student and I feel a bit disappointed to tell you the truth. We decided to be 'weird' and go with a pneumatic shooter. It is DEAD ON accurate +- 6 inches at the most, but the ROF is approx only one per second due to our hopper design which was almost an afterthought. At one point we had 3 differnt people building three seperate designs.

The camera tracking works, but its too slow for my tastes. I never got the time to tune my PID loops. I have all the bits and pieces of autonomous working but nothing has been tried all together even once. Also, at the competition i am going to have to generate a table of shooter angles vs camera angle to target.

The drivetrain is your typical 4wd using the kit trannies and a pretty low ratio so nothing special there.

I feel like i have wasted the last 6 weeks of my life after seeing all the other robot pics. I suppose i should look on the bright side, It was an AWESOME journey to get here.

I was really excited about programming this year. I was finally going to have a chance to show off my stuff and mess wiht PID, vision systems etc on a FIRST robot. Well, since our other programmer graduated last year, found that up until 3 days before ship i was soo tied up with mechanical things that i did not write a single line of code. It all works(in theory ) but i fear we will not get our more than say 6 balls in auto.

I'm sure that all sounded rather rambly and disorganized. If other people feel positively about their robot i would love to hear their story. What is life like on other teams?