[FTC]: Full Field vs Low-cost Field

[JohnFogarty]

I'm just saying. a wood field is easy to build, cheap, and easy to assemble and take with you for demos. our's assembles in 4 pieces and just requires some wood screws to lock together.

[PhilBot]

To clarify Derrick's post (FTC 4240).

Although we have a full field, it is a wooden one. I think Derrick's point was that a full field (even if it's not a nice official metal/glass one) is better than a partial field.

Where we run into trouble sometimes is when the field elements attach to the side walls and the spacing ends up not being the same because the materials aren't the same.

Eg: our low goals ended up being about 1/4" higher than the offical goals. Our mechanism worked at home, but not on the real field. Although the rules say to allow 1" error on positioning, it's just not practical in some instances. Having the perfect setup is really needed in some cases. Since the plans show how to make a field element to fit on the official perimeter, it just doesn't fit the same on a wooden or plastic field.

The devil is in the details. Maybe one day we will be able to afforst a real field.

[JYEH]

We do see a difference between wooden field and metal field. Dispenser mounted on the metal field flexes away more, which affects how the baton projects forward on the L bracket. Thats why we have an arm to capture and control the tilt of the dispenser.

John
Landroids 4220

[NalaTI]

Originally Posted by PhilBot

To clarify Derrick's post (FTC 4240).

Eg: our low goals ended up being about 1/4" higher than the offical goals. Our mechanism worked at home, but not on the real field. Although the rules say to allow 1" error on positioning, it's just not practical in some instances. Having the perfect setup is really needed in some cases. Since the plans show how to make a field element to fit on the official perimeter, it just doesn't fit the same on a wooden or plastic field.

The devil is in the details. Maybe one day we will be able to afforst a real field.

Actually the low goals on the Edison fields at world were (at best) 3/8" lower than shown in the Q&A (The Game - Playing Field #6) -- we got permission and measured during lunch on the first day. Two of them were at 3-1/4, one of them was at 3", and one was 2-7/8". Since the Q&A says they were supposed to be at 3-5/8 we were disappointed and had to scrap one of our coolest autonomous routines as we were not able to get to a dispenser below 3-1/8". Note that all of them were within the 1" tolerance allowed by the rules, it just wasn't any fun for us as we expected the fields to be better than they were!

BTW, the autonomous that we scrapped could do 100 points when it worked perfect (in practice)... dump the initial 5 (30 pts), cross to the other side (10), empty the dispenser next to our low goal (30), while shooting (using a paddle like last year) all of the batons that we dispensed into our own one point goal (30 more). When it worked it was beautiful... At world we were only able to try it one time (on the red high dispenser) and it didn't line up right...