Now you know how I feel
Anytime I'm bored or there's review of high school material in my engineering classes, I just pull out the notebook and sketch really rough ideas (as if this wasn't rough enough). I've got a crazy holonomic bot (including calculations of the relative ball capacity of building an arm that rests along the diagonal of the robot size cube verusus paralell), an archimedes screw idea (too difficult), giant hoppers, sorting hoppers... I can't stop
While I have a design nice and set, I'm going to be (hopefully) throwing my robot together Friday night (except for the chassis) with the assistance of other people's kindly lent parts. Programming done in advance and fixed once the thing gets built. If not that, then I have about $200 on Vex stuff to buy. You should have a nice leg up on me as I'm assuming the worst in terms of lent parts and in general trying to use as little as possible (if I'm desperate, the whole design can work with 4 motors and a servo, but ideally 7 and a servo so the arm halves can be independently controlled + 4 wheel drive). Apparently all of RPI's Vex parts are hidden deep in lairs I know nothing about.
As for doing one thing well versus doing it all, it kind of just all fell together... different height goals meant an arm was a simple solution, an arm means you can add a hook to hang fairly easily (if I distribute weight right), and the opponent ball posesssion solution was an "ah-ha!" moment I had just today after spending a week trying to figure out how to sort more than one ball at a time. Besides, what's better than a good chokehold strategy?
(all of this "friday night building" makes me wonder... What if you had 24 hours to build and compete with a Vex robot for a competition you learn about at the beginning of the 24 hours? And you had to work in the same room as your competitors? With the same shared parts? Like a reality show, but robots
)