"The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all

[Chris is me]

Just thought I'd add to / play devil's advocate with a few of the responses in this thread.

Originally Posted by Chadfrom308

-Floor pick up is not that important. The good teams in the 2011 season and 2013 season never picked up from the floor

Lots of people piled on to this response, probably going a bit too far. The way you wrote this it's not factually correct or great advice. Almost every competitive team in 2011 had a floor loader. This isn't to say that a simpler robot that did not pick up off the floor couldn't be effective. In fact, one of them, 1503, was extremely effective.

In 2013, you *definitely* didn't need a floor loader to be competitive. Many of the best teams didn't have one.

A good takeaway from this should be "Game tasks are far less essential than you think they are." There are very few tasks that a robot MUST do to be competitive. Don't fall into the trap of "if we want to keep up with team XXXX, we have to climb / floor load / whatever"

Originally Posted by Pault

In 2013, ~50% of the top tier teams had floor pickups, as opposed to the ~5% of all teams that had one.

Be weary of conflating correlation with causation here. The implication here is that the top teams picked up off the floor primarily, which just isn't true.

Using Top 25 as a proxy for "top tier teams", only 9 or 10 of them had a floor pickup that was used extensively in teleop. Another 5 or 6 had pickups almost exclusively used in autonomous mode. Of the top 25, 18-19 of them used the feeder station as their primary source of discs in teleop.

The top teams had intakes for autonomous mode, and many of those teams picked up off the floor in teleop, yes. But having a floor pickup instead of a human loader, with no autonomous, could actually make you a *less* effective scorer depending on the speed of your floor pickup and driver ability. I saw it many times this year - a team spends 20-30 seconds chasing 4 stray discs while a human loaded cycler runs home, gets 4, and runs back before the floor pickup is done.

[Pault]

I did write a rebuttal for Chris Is Me, but I realized that I would just be derailing this thread even further. Let's try to get back on track.

[Starke]

- Although easy, using Google searches and YouTube videos during the first few days of the build season may not provide the "best" design and/or strategy for the game challenge.

[BurkeHalderman]

Use two different colors of pneumatic tubing. One color for the port responsible for extending the piston and another color for the retraction port. That way it's easy to trace the tubing and make repairs. I really wish we had done this on our 2013 bot, we replaced our shooter at our third regional and it probably took an extra 15 minutes to redo the plumbing because all the tubing was red.

[DampRobot]

Add about .003" to the center distance between gears in gearboxes. It can help the gearboxes run well with the lower quality gears and the practically non-existent wear-in-times that FRC sees.

[BrendanB]

Design with the intent that everything can be replaced quickly! You never know what may go wrong.

Don't use bolts to fasten electronics that may need to be replaced on a dime (motor controllers and sidecars).

Think of how you can save weight when you design parts, not when you put the robot on the scale.

[ttldomination]

Design around consistency and Murphy's Law.

That is to say that if a design works 75% of the time in the shop, chances are that it'll work less in practice, and even less in competition. A good design is a consistent design.

For the past 3-4 years, I've been a part of machines that were not consistent, and at some points, it got so bad, that I was more scared of our machine jamming than of our opponents. That's when you know it's bad.

- Sunny G.

[safiq10]

-The Chief Delphi is your best friend. You can learn anything from here! especially during offseason. So make sure someone on the team is keeping up with it daily.

[PayneTrain]

If you only focus on one thing for a robot, make it the drive train. There is a wealth of information available concerning them over the decades of competition. It's a lot easier to improve, swap out, or just lightly iterate on a game-specific mechanism than scrap a drive base mid-season. You get a passable one out of the box with easy upgrades available to peruse through online. Plenty of universal systems like WCD and other configurations are available to easily adapt to the current year's limits, and there is a design calculator there to let you plug and play to figure out if your idea will work. It's a lot of little things you can do on a drive base to make a big impact.

Originally Posted by DampRobot

Add about .003" to the center distance between gears in gearboxes. It can help the gearboxes run well with the lower quality gears and the practically non-existent wear-in-times that FRC sees.

Or use this handy dandy calculator from WCP which adds things in for you.

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

If you only focus on one thing for a robot, make it the drive train. There is a wealth of information available concerning them over the decades of competition. It's a lot easier to improve, swap out, or just lightly iterate on a game-specific mechanism than scrap a drive base mid-season. You get a passable one out of the box with easy upgrades available to peruse through online. Plenty of universal systems like WCD and other configurations are available to easily adapt to the current year's limits, and there is a design calculator there to let you plug and play to figure out if your idea will work. It's a lot of little things you can do on a drive base to make a big impact.

At the same time, any drivetrain that takes longer than 2-3 days to finish is more complex than you need (this ignores swerve because if you can only focus on one part of your robot, you shouldn't be doing swerve). The Kitbot on Steroids can be built in a half an hour if a team knows what they're doing, and it's not hard to read up how. 3 days for any custom drive should be plenty.

[Chadfrom308]

When I said floor pick up was not that important, I wasn't saying that it was useless or you don't need one!

Floor pick up is really only important when things are easy to pick up. Frisbees were hard so it wasnt important. 2012 basketballs were really easy to pick up, so you pretty much needed one. And in 2011, Most teams did have one, yes, but, I remember the cycling teams like The Thunder Chickens and The Gator Bots were much faster than trying to pick up tubes (mainly because they were so light that they moved out of the way easy)

As for years before that, I cant speak, I have only been around since '11

[cmrnpizzo14]

Originally Posted by Chadfrom308

When I said floor pick up was not that important, I wasn't saying that it was useless or you don't need one!

Floor pick up is really only important when things are easy to pick up. Frisbees were hard so it wasnt important. 2012 basketballs were really easy to pick up, so you pretty much needed one. And in 2011, Most teams did have one, yes, but, I remember the cycling teams like The Thunder Chickens and The Gator Bots were much faster than trying to pick up tubes (mainly because they were so light that they moved out of the way easy)

As for years before that, I cant speak, I have only been around since '11

I think that the team you are really thinking of is Spartonics 1503.

I also think that the better way to phrase this to make everyone happy is that a complex strategy and design is not necessary. Keeping things simple and leaving the in game thinking to a minimum is more effective than swamping drivers with options that they will never use or, even worse, use ineffectively.

[KrazyCarl92]

Originally Posted by Chadfrom308

2012 basketballs were really easy to pick up, so you pretty much needed one.

Another important thing to consider is the mechanism of the game piece return to the field. In 2012, game pieces were placed in the inbounding station AFTER your opponents had already scored them. If a robot could only acquire game pieces from the inbounding station and not the floor, that robot would be choosing to generally play from behind.

In 2010, balls were returned by the alliance that scored them, which made the recycling strategy executed by 469 effective.

In 2011 and 2013, game pieces remained as scored for the rest of the match. Any new game pieces introduced could be received directly from a feeding station, meaning that this would be a viable strategy as an exclusive method of acquiring game pieces.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by KrazyCarl92

Another important thing to consider is the mechanism of the game piece return to the field. In 2012, game pieces were placed in the inbounding station AFTER your opponents had already scored them. If a robot could only acquire game pieces from the inbounding station and not the floor, that robot would be choosing to generally play from behind.

In 2010, balls were returned by the alliance that scored them, which made the recycling strategy executed by 469 effective.

In 2011 and 2013, game pieces remained as scored for the rest of the match. Any new game pieces introduced could be received directly from a feeding station, meaning that this would be a viable strategy as an exclusive method of acquiring game pieces.

Building on this in 2011 you were allowed to throw tubes on the field during teleop. In 2013 white discs were not allowed to be thrown.

If white discs were allowed to be thrown during teleop (ignoring safety issues) we probably would have seen more ground pickup robots.

[MichaelBick]

Originally Posted by Chadfrom308

Frisbees were hard so it wasnt important.

What if they didn't have the human feeding stations this year. Intakes would have been pretty important then. The point is that you cannot make a generalization about a manipulator because it is totally game dependent.