Never Do This, and Other Good Ideas Gone Bad

[EricH]

I accidentally tip your robot over with your gravity-down lift up. Oops, your lift doesn't go down anymore.

330 always adds a "gravity" cable to lifts for the case where you're tipped over and you need to unblock the field. It also helps to retract the lift for other cases like hanging on a bar. It's not that hard to add to the drum, either, if the winch is sized right.

Scissors lifts can be really nasty to get right. If you do get them right, they work OK... but they do have their weaknesses. I've seen a single-joint arm clean game pieces off the top of a scissor lift with one sweep, back in 2005. Hit a scissors lift so that it sways and... well... not pretty.

330 does have one team rule: All deployables shall be retractable (exception--we decide it's not necessary to pull them back in). Reason: We don't want to have to be dragging something around all match because it deployed too early by accident--and it's really surprising when we pull up ramps and go defend a spoiler (2007) or do other similar things.