Mistakes of 2013

[Tyler_Kaplan]

This thread is about the mistakes made by teams in the last year, not by FIRST. What I mean is what mistakes have teams made during the off season, build season, or during competitions, and what have you taken away from them. As we go through the different challenges that FIRST presents us with, we all grow and acquire new skills that we didn't have before. So what are some of the mistakes that you've learned from this year?

[Michael Blake]

Never... and I mean _never_... attempt a Helix lift for Frisbees.

"Helix" is a banned word these days on 3481... like Voldemort.

LOL

--Michael Blake

[Xavbro]

Over complicating a climbing mechanism. The K.I.S.S. method is your best friend.

[Gdeaver]

Right after the kick off in our game analysis and strategy meetings we talked about full court shooting and came to the conclusion that accuracy at that distance would make it a bad design choice. It would not be a factor in the game. A few weeks later some video came out that totally proved us wrong. FCS indeed were a factor this year. Lesson learned, First teams will find a way. Don't discount strategies.

[who716]

Our team did make one mistake and that was going to one regional event with the event being a week six, this was very tough because by that time most teams already had one regional under them and made improvements for this one, we went into the event not knowing exactly what to expect

[Taylor]

We massively underestimated the abilities of other teams. We thought that if we could consistently climb to the 30-point level, we'd be one of the highest scoring teams at a regional.
Boy were we wrong.

[pfreivald]

We bit off more than we could chew, design-wise.

(We still ended up with the best robot 1551 has ever built, but it would have been even better had we finished it early and had more practice time.)

[peirvine]

Our prototype to CAD to final production communications. We had a decent working belt shooter this year, but the some "improvements" were made in the CAD and it completely changed the shooter and we had to start over with 2 days left of build...

[Whippet]

1. Deciding to make a 30 point climber with a very limited budget. We ended up scrapping the whole design at regionals in favor of a 10 point climber, but our robot was at that point pretty much useless for defense due to all the weight cuts we made in order to try to get it to climb.

2. Casters: never again.

[rsisk]

Once again ignoring the rule that game piece control is critical to winning the game. We really needed an active floor pickup on our robot.

[orangemoore]

Assuming that building a 30 point climber with 7 people was possible with only 11 hours of build time a week.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by rsisk

Once again ignoring the rule that game piece control is critical to winning the game. We really needed an active floor pickup on our robot.

Why?

[Calvin Hartley]

(My personal opinion) We should have spent more time dialing in our FCS better, instead of tuning other shots.

[Walter Deitzler]

As has been said, assuming we could do a 30 pt. climb with limited mentorship and few resources.

Assuming that a mid-field feeder bot was going to be utilized (it wasn't, we ended up playing defense most of our matches, without much pushing power, which didn't do well in the end.)

Accidentely leaving a safety block for our arm in during a match, trying to rotate that arm, then shearing all screws holding it on the sprocket that turns it.

Deciding not to put on an easy 10 point hang that we had with us at competition (I have no idea why...but it will be on for offseason events.)

Attending only 1 regional (We had most of our technical issues worked out by the end of it, but it was too late by then.)

On the back of the one above, not fundraising enough to attend two regionals. (We did do some fundraising, just not $5000 more than what we have had in previous years. We have only ever attended 1 regional a year.)

Going with a tank style driver set-up when we decided to have a kiwi drive (we slipped a whole lot, and it was hard for the driver to control, resulting in too many tech fouls.)

Using too many parenthesis when I write (I mean seriously, who does this? )

[rsisk]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Why?

Game piece control is important because that is usually the main way to score points. The easier and faster you can acquire game pieces usually translates into more points scored. Obviously a generalization, but one that holds true in most cases.

We needed an active floor pickup because our passive pickup was slow and unreliable. Also an active pickup opens the door to a 7 disk autonomous which was one of our stretch goals we did not achieve