Quote:
Originally Posted by scawsome
Hi, everyone!
I am from team 230 and our team is trying to decide if we should put effort into designing a ball magnet. We were pretty sucessful without one at WPI but I saw that ball magnets were pretty useful at other competitions. I wanted to ask other teams several questions.
1) How useful are ball magnets when shooting or pushing balls into the goal?
2) What kinds of ball magnets (roller,suction,etc.) worked well?
3) How have teams done with scoring and pushing balls into the goal without a ball magnet device?
Any opinions or suggestions will be very helpful.
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It's better to do one thing well than two things average. The position no one wants to be in is that you can do neither well because you tried to do both.
In my mind, what made you guys win WPI is that you did one aspect of the game well. You kicked balls from every zone and scored consistently doing so. Your game routine made it very hard to turn the tide of the match after the first 10 seconds of teleop. You let your partners deal with the nuances of the game involving possession and set up a balanced alliance.
My team was an example of the latter. We wanted awesome kicking, possession, and hanging, and it took us until Saturday to even kick a possessed ball at all.
So with that warning... Do you guys have a practice robot? Are you able to build something around your kicker without modifying it? How much weight can you play with? If you have a practice robot, then you get to prototype changes before you make them - significantly less risk. If you have one, you can just try it and see if you like the results. If you need to modify your kicker and don't have a practice robot, that's a very significant risk. Is that one you're willing to take? Weight dictates changes, too.
If you need help with a vacuum, drop me a PM and I'll tell you what my team did wrong and how to do it right.