Never Do This, and Other Good Ideas Gone Bad

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by JesseK

1.) Do not gear a drive train for >10 fps if it has less than 3 CIMs' worth of power. It does ok in a straight line, but even with a 6WD drop center it had some difficulty turning 145lbs.

I've got some bad news for you, cause this years kitbot is geared for something like 14-15 fps.

Anyways, I think all my never-agains have been covered by others, what with the elevators and scissor lifts and all. Oddly, I never swore off Banebots transmissions, despite being bitten by them in '07 like everyone else. (At GLR, we had the machine shop weld the output shaft to the carrier plate in our two RS-540 trannies. Worked great, actually.)

Our most grievous faults have usually been in strategizing and focusing too much on a marginal strategy and not enough on one or two core strengths that can adapt to multiple strategies. So if something goes wrong in design, build, or competition, we haven't left ourselves enough of a fallback position.

For example, last year we thought we'd be super clever with a ramp to get someone on the platform, plus a lift that could our robot and another robot on top of us. A scissor lift, to simplify drive for the other robots, natch. So when we discover halfway through build that this thing will be monstrously heavy, we scrap it for a different lift that sorta still works with our original concept... Which didn't work out well. We should've stopped and re-evaluated the whole game plan when that major system didn't pan out, but we panicked and forged ahead anyways.

So I guess my biggest never-again is the too-clever game strategy that only works if you do A, B, C, D and E in a match. Much better to have a robot that can adapt to different strategies through a match/regional.