rookies need help! (was: we need help)

[rsegrest]

How many students are on your team and how much engineering support do you have?

[GeDarkanator]

Originally Posted by rsegrest

How many students are on your team and how much engineering support do you have?

we are 20-25 students in the team. we some engineering support but not alot of it.

[tsaksa]

Originally Posted by GeDarkanator

we are 20-25 students in the team. we some engineering support but not alot of it.

With a new team and not a lot of engineering support you want to make sure you do not over commit by attempting too much. For example, it sounds like you are building a robot that climbs (possibly above the first level) shoots, and picks up Frisbees both from the feeding stations and the floor. That is a lot to try for given your experience and resources. I am not saying do not try for that if your team wants to. Just have some fall back plans.

Perhaps work on only accepting disks from the feeding station for now, and consider picking disks up from the floor later if you have more time and resources. The most common mistake teams make is not being realistic about what can be accomplished during the two week build build period.

You heard me correctly, the build time for a robot ideally (in my opinion) is only two weeks. One week gets consumed in strategy, design, and possibly acquiring any specialized components. Then you need to finish the building in time to leave one or two weeks for integration, programming, debug, possible retrofits to correct issues, and driver practice. If you build a robot that does less, but is completed early enough to allow extensive testing, debug and practice, you will be much better off that if you build one that does everything you wanted, but is finished on the last day of build season and not fully debugged.

[eedoga]

Your plan to climb sounds a lot like what one of the ideas we are looking at does.

Our climbing robot design has a central channel for driving up one of the pyramid polls, and a bucket on the end of an arm for dumping disks into the scoring basket at the top.

If you don't have a lot of engineering support I would focus on getting a robot that can move around, and possibly adding some way of dumping / shooting disks. If you can get that working, then look to hang on the bottom rung of the pyramid which I think for many will be the default.

Check out teh "robot in three days" thread to see what they were able to put together pretty quickly.

Also, don't get discouraged, read the manuals for each part of the robot. There are resources like the "FIRST electronics test bench setup manual" that will get you to the point of having a chassis that can drive around.

You may also want to look at the pneumatics manual to see how to get pistons working.

Hope this helps

Edoga