Turning back the clock 2012

[Mark Sheridan]

Enforcing our weight safety factor much stricter

Avoid two side pickup, (took one off to help make weight)

Tank drive instead of mecanum (could actually drive up ramp fine, but could not help another robot up or "control" a multi-bot balance)

Move the build season one week forward (too much discussion)

Have mass to add a stinger once we saw 33 and 148 in action

[loyal]

Looking back I wish the team could have

Removed upper conveyer

move shooter to top of bot

made the frame smaller

[Kevin Ray]

In 14 years of competing we finally have a short list of "coulda, shoulda, woulda's"
We have: low cg (34" high bot)
single wheel shooter/adjustable hood/rotating turret
shooter opposite intake
heavily weighted opposite intake (70%)
stinger for triple balance
a decent tipper --it works well, but it takes about 3-5 sec to get on a bridge. If we had our druthers, we'd prefer to be able to drop a better wedge and run at 3-5 fps right onto the bridge.

[Alex.q]

I wish I hadn't been so willing to give up on what I knew would work, but hey, one person can't (and perhaps shouldn't) force everyone to do things his way.

I wish we had formed a subteam to build a bridge manipulator.

I wish we had finished our shooter earlier so we could have actually tested it to be able to improve compression, put on only one set of wheels, etc

I wish our collector fed directly into the shooter.

Non-essential but I wish we had designed a stinger, a drop down collector, and put less emphasis on being able to drive over the barrier, which we were not able to do anyway once everything was assembled.

I wish we had built real bridges to test with. rather than light plywood ones.

Additionally, we had considered a wider ball collector, but did not think we would be able to prevent jamming. I'm not really sure how teams were able to do this, could someone who did it well explain their design? Thanks.

[TheFish]

This thread seems to be (as one would expect) dominated by teams who didn't do very well and/or underperformed.

As we all know, everyone can improve and continuously get better. I wonder if any of the "Elites" would weigh in to this discussion on things they wish they had done better or focused on more.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by TheFish

This thread seems to be (as one would expect) dominated by teams who didn't do very well and/or underperformed.

As we all know, everyone can improve and continuously get better. I wonder if any of the "Elites" would weigh in to this discussion on things they wish they had done better or focused on more.

Some of the elite teams i talked to at central valley have already fixed what they did not like about their robot. Especially in regards to stingers.

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by TheFish

As we all know, everyone can improve and continuously get better. I wonder if any of the "Elites" would weigh in to this discussion on things they wish they had done better or focused on more.

If you get the chance, just walk up to them in the Pits (Provided they're not busy), snag a student, and talk to them. That's what I did in KC and I learned quite a bit about the Lee's Summit triple alliance (1986, 1730, and 1987 for those outside this region). They're more than happy to talk, reflect, and help you improve. It must be lonely at the top...

[sg999]

Our team could have/should have/would have (in my opinion):

Not used a claw (We got the idea of a multi tool over the bumper collector... we used a claw instead of a conveyor, and a pulley system that was really too weak/fast to be effective. We also ran into issues with getting the claw to open/close because there was an issue with the encoder)

Removed the motor on the top wheel (We have a dual axel system that shoots pretty consistently, there's just a motor sitting there that we could have used somewhere else)

Done everything faster so we had more time with vision tracking (The vision tracking program got done, but was never implemented due to time restrictions)

Not used a four wheel tank drive with high traction wheels and a really tight chain (For the practice matches, we had a lot of trouble manuvering)

Built an actual bridge

Chosen our drivers before build season (We ended up choosing drivers at the actual competition because we simply ran out of time to have try outs)

Built a test robot with the same drive train

However, we did do a couple things that I liked, such as having a low center of gravity and a really small/light robot (dimensions: 27 in x27 in, height:37 in, weight with out battery/bumpers:91 lb) among other things

[Steven Sigley]

Make our shooter better in autonomous and more accurate in general.
Besides that though i was very pleased with our stacking capability, and the recognition that came with that.

[MichaelBick]

-Over the bump or 973, 1323, and 2415 collector system
-Higher gearing on our pickup and less on our elevator
-1/16 thick Al tube on our superstructure instead of 1/8 so that we could have enough wait for our perfectly working bridge manipulator
-Faster gearing on our shooter
-The shooter hood that 973 gave us for elims
-Stinger
-Fully working practice bot
-More Practice time

It really was our best robot so far, but just some things that could have happened

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by Gray Adams

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.
.

That tends to happen with worm gears

[z_beeblebrox]

4183:

-Better bridge accessing mechanism. (although we're fixing that before championships)

-6 or 8 wheel chassis not designed to go over bump. We made a lot of sacrifices in maneuverability to get our chassis to go over the bump, and it did unreliably. At two regionals, I think we only tried going over the bump once and we got stuck.

-Finish CAD earlier. We used laser cut sheet metal for most of our robot, so had to finish all our CAD design before we could get any parts for our robot. Therefore we finished the robot on day 45 and had almost no practice before the Utah regional.

-Machine vision (if only we had time...)

[Hawiian Cadder]

I would have chosen to go 3/16 center drop instead of 1/8, it worked well until the middle tread wore more than the outer tread, the robot still turned, just not in the smooth arcs that I had hoped for.

I would have rocked our entire tower back, so that the balls were released more towards the inside of the robot, allowing 3pt fender shots. (the current shooting geometry necessitates being about 24 inches back from the fender for 3 pointers, though it does dunk 2's really well. This change would have taken less than an hour if we had foreseen the problem before making electronics boards. We might make the change for an off season event.

I would have abandoned a drive train powered bridge lowering device earlier. the winch powered arm we put on at competition worked much better and was simpler/lighter.

Only 1 major regret about the robot, and 2 minor ones. I fell that we had a pretty successful season.

[bam-bam]

Things I learned:

• 3-wheeled shooters will not give the results you need no matter the set-up.
• Watch the robot weight! We lost important features that we could've used.
• CAD.... we need more CADing.... (or at least I do)...
• Prototyping. We had a general ideas that worked, but we kind of prototyped on the wrong things.

Things we did well:

• Strategy. We kind of missed the mark, but we had requirements that kind let us win.
• Drivetrain. Nailed it this year.
• Scouting. We got reliable data that we could make predictions from for once.

We had a great year. In fact, expect an improved 1501 at the champs....

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by bam-bam

• 3-wheeled shooters will not give the results you need no matter the set-up.

1676 says hello.