Team Titanium 1986: 1.23 sec. deployed

[jspatz1]

Doing our part to help this minibot arms race get way out of hand. 1.23s overall, 0.87s on the pole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-aryXw-XhA

[biancs15]

I believe that this is the fastest minibot I have seen so far!
Amazing job and good luck in St. Louis!

[cziggy343]

Looks great! Excited to get to see you guys in action this weekend!

[davepowers]

Awesome minibot and deployment! I wish we could race ours next to yours! We have very similar designs. Who knows, maybe we'll get too on Einstein?!

[Hawiian Cadder]

wow, i thought the one you had at Denver was fast. that thing is amazing.

[J_Miles]

And contribute, you have. The level of competition of minibots at the CMP is going to be fantastic. I foresee plenty of matches finishing before 0:00 on divisional semis/finals and on Einstein.

I certainly hope the field electronics are working at peak performance this week.

[Navid Shafa]

That's amazing. I look forward to pit-neighboring with you guys and hopefully getting the opportunity to play with you! I thought our minibot was fast, yeesh. With that ramp, you guys are at max speed before you even hit the pole...

See you soon!

[R1ffSurf3r]

what diameter are you running

[sdcantrell56]

Looks beautiful. I'm glad to see all these super fast minibots coming into champs. We were inspired as well and will be rocking one too. I'm curious your radius as well? We're running 6" and a tiny minibot

[Alpha Beta]

Thanks everyone for the comments. The team was a bit nervous about trading out our old consistent sub-2 second with deployment minibot, but felt like this was an arms race we didn't want to be left out of.

what diameter are you running

I think we might all be curious about what each one found the optimum radius to be. For that to mean anything we would also have to share the weight of the minibot and how we minimized friction between the wheel shafts and the legal bearings. The strength of magnet and gap between it and the pole also played a role in optimizing the design. I think it is more fun for each team to come to their own conclusion on these numbers through experimental iterations. As you can imagine the wheel diameter is slightly bigger with this design than it was with our old one. Not as much as I first anticipated though.

(We also found that some tetrix motors are just plain faster than others. Our identical backup minibot seems to go slightly faster than our first. Hence, we are promoting it to 1st string.)

wow, i thought the one you had at Denver was fast. that thing is amazing.

The beauty of the new deployment system is that it uses the exact some release commands as the old one. 1 pneumatic cylinder to release the allignment device, and a second to release the minibot. We literally just have to bolt on the new system and hook up the exact same pressure lines. No change to the driver interface and no change to the code. We wanted to do this for Denver but we didn't have any with-holding allowance left.

[R1ffSurf3r]

Originally Posted by Alpha Beta

I think we might all be curious about what each one found the optimum radius to be. For that to mean anything we would also have to share the weight of the minibot and how we minimized friction between the wheel shafts and the legal bearings. The strength of magnet and gap between it and the pole also played a role in optimizing the design. I think it is more fun for each team to come to their own conclusion on these numbers through experimental iterations. As you can imagine the wheel diameter is slightly bigger with this design than it was with our old one. Not as much as I first anticipated though.

(We also found that some tetrix motors are just plain faster than others. Our identical backup minibot seems to go slightly faster than our first. Hence, we are promoting it to 1st string.)

That's cool. Unfortunately we burned up a motor today, and our other pair has been through 2 regionals already. I just hope we get lucky with the set of motors we just ordered.

We actually even tried a .75in diameter wheel with mixed results.

[Alpha Beta]

Originally Posted by R1ffSurf3r

That's cool. Unfortunately we burned up a motor today, and our other pair has been through 2 regionals already. I just hope we get lucky with the set of motors we just ordered.

We actually even tried a .75in diameter wheel with mixed results.

Wow 0.75in seems large indeed. I suppose our desire for speed was tempered slightly by our need for consistancy.

[Chris is me]

In our experiments, we determined that the effects of roller diameter top speed versus acceleration nearly "cancel out" for many different roller diameters. I can't wait until the Championships are over so I can start a thread about minibots where we can all FINALLY talk about all of the different design options and what "tweaks" worked best.

[sam456]

i cant exactly tell but it looks to me like you use springs to accelerate the minbot off of the launcher i know its in the horizontal but that has to translate in to movement up the poll that does not come from the battery

[Alpha Beta]

Originally Posted by sam456

i cant exactly tell but it looks to me like you use springs to accelerate the minbot off of the launcher i know its in the horizontal but that has to translate in to movement up the poll that does not come from the battery

I think it would be hard to keep a spring loaded deployment legal when integrated with a ramp. I can't wait to see if someone finds a legal way to integrate the concept at champs.