Thoughts on Ri3D and BuildBlitz

[cadandcookies]

With regards to the original goal of this thread, I would see Ri3D/BB improved mostly by increasing documentation and actually seeing some matches played. My dream would be that there would be enough robots close enough together to actually run a few matches.

I loved the addition of CAD files this year-- I know I learned a bit about how to structure full robot assemblies by investigating the Build Blitz CAD files.

The other improvements I could see would be improving livestreaming-- some of the mics were a bit buggy and I think there was at least one potato being used as a camera. The entire idea of livestreaming the events was really cool-- I particularly liked when, in the BuildBlitz scene, Karthik and JVN sat down and talked about designing robots during build season. It's really cool for me, as someone who doesn't see many of the "big names" in FIRST at regionals, to see some of the people I personally look up to acting like regular people.

Overall, I just can't wait to see the standards raised once again next year. Ri3D and BB really outdid themselves this year, and I hope to see future growth in these valuable resources for teams that don't have very many (and those that do).

[TheMadCADer]

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli

Something that really would help every team, rookies and veterans alike, is to see a match in action, showing potential strategies, and mainly just to see the timing of certain tasks. One thing that really influences a lot of design decisions on teams is the (mis)timing of completing objectives in a match. I know this would've helped my team in 2012, we used horrible time estimates for each task to be completed and we underestimated how many points could potentially be scored!

I would also really like to see the quick build projects move in this direction. I could even see this as a good replacement for the yearly game animation. Whenever I show a new student the game animation, it has to come with a heap of disclaimers that all of the robots they show are completely unrealistic and not representative of what to expect. I always end up showing videos of previous games to give them a better perspective on match play.

[DampRobot]

Someone said something about seeing videos of these people failing-- I agree, I'd like to see much more of that. First, like they mentioned, it's good to learn that these crazy good FRC mentors mess up sometimes, and don't get everything perfect the first time. Second, you often learn a lot more about a (potentially successful) system by seeing it fail then by seeing is succeed. For example, it would be awesome to know if, for example, the geometry of team JVN's catapult was just thrown together and pretty much worked from the get-go, or required hours of laborious iteration and several failed prototypes before it worked. When I design, it's really good to know what elements of the design can be played around with a bit to make the mechanism easier to integrate, and which geometry or materials are so critical that it's worth making sacrifices to persevere them exactly the way they are. Seeing these teams fail prominently would give great insight into how hard specific aspects of the design challenge are, and where compromises should be made in final designs.

To those of you that said that five robots covered too much of solution space, I'd encourage you to think more broadly. To my eye, all the teams seemed to perfect the "Team 16 clone" type of robot in a slightly different way. Sure, some had slightly different intake and shooter geometry, but fundamentally, the robots that I saw all really worked in pretty much the same way. There are whole classes of shooters, intakes, and robots that were not covered in the 72 hour builds. Just like last year.

Personally, I'd love if every rookie and second year team without a solid design of their own just "copied" one of the 72 hour build designs. They'd learn a ton just making it work on their own (I'd argue more than they would by just fielding a semi-drivable kitbot), and they'd make regionals more fun for themselves and other teams by raising the level of competition.