Turning back the clock 2012

[Gray Adams]

With more thinking, I'm sure there's a not of non-robot things that could have been better, but I'll save that for later.

Robot things I'd like to change would be making the whole thing shorter for sure. I get a little worried about it tipping sometimes, and it rocks a LOT when I go full forward to back because its CG is not very low. Not that I do that very often or need to, but it just limits how aggressively I can move that robot. It doesn't like to stay flat on the ground if you do 360s either. It starts to jump. A nice low robot would have been nice.

The weakest part though has to be the transportation from the intake the the shooter. We had this complicated serpentine path with all these crazy ideas so that we could control the balls inside the robot well, but it ended up working nothing like that. Retrospectively, it could be hugely simplified, a lot lighter, easier to maintain, easier to control, and much nicer looking.

Structurally, I'm not thrilled about the compound angles on the tower's supports, especially since we ended up mounting some things to them. We have 8 pieces of 1x1x.063 tubing comprising our tower, and that just seems like way too much. I've seen some great designs that keep the weight much lower, make a nice use of lexan instead of aluminum, and do some other cool things. Down low on the frame, it really isn't all that strong. The front bent up a bit when we played some aggressive defense on the side of our robot that we take balls in from. Our bumpers mounts are made in a way that pretty much forces them to bend instead of transferring the forces back to the rest of the frame.

Our use of polycarb looks pretty sloppy. The polycarb that's supposed to guide the ball is completely unsupported and deforms when a ball goes through. I was going to design some aluminum rails to supports it, but the CAD is a huge mess and I have no idea what shape the polycarb is supposed to be. We plan to invest a little bit more time post-Championship to redo the polycarb and the sponsor decals. I really wish we could have done it before Champs, but there simply isn't enough time to tear out all the polycarb and install new plastic just for cosmetic purposes.

Our bridge lowering device is a little hard to use in terms of lining it up because it's not that long (6" or so from the frame perimeter at most), but I guess that's why we got away with using a window motor to lower the bridge. I doubt we'd have enough torque if we had a 14" appendage.

The shooter is pretty good, but I still can't believe we put so much effort into using the Kinect on our robot to aim. It never did anything for us that the Axis camera didn't, was more difficult to mount, forced us to put it off to one side of the wheels, and was about a full pound heavier than an axis camera. My paranoia as a driver about the weight way up to of the kinect, from what I knew about the software, and from what I'd heard other teams were doing, I didn't want to use a Kinect starting from Week 2. But 10 weeks later we're finally going to scrap the Kinect.

The drive trains are pretty solid. I wish the robot could be pushed across the floor by hand when it's off, but that's barely an issue.

Practice time would have been good, but it's pretty hard with very limited shop access after build, and no real space for driving. We nabbed a carpet from SVR, but we don't really have space to lay it out. Maybe we'll steal the old gym next year for some practice.

I could probably spend hours coming up with things I wish we did differently, but I guess those are just things I'll have to improve for next time (whatever project, organization, or job that may be).