What was there before AndyMark?

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by magnets

Wildstang used to build the coolest things ever (swerve, arms, swerve modules that went up and down in 04....), and it seems that these sort of super complicated well engineered parts aren't becoming more common.

I think quite the opposite, there are so many teams doing so many cool things that you can longer just point to Wildstang as being the only cool one!

JVN had a great point in this thread.

Originally Posted by JVN

I watched a bunch of old matches the other day with my students. It is surprising to me how badly these games have aged. Robots are slow and clunky. Things which I remember being incredible now seem ho-hum. I personally wouldn't want to go back to that level of performance.

[geomapguy]

Interesting picture
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/25316

[fox46]

Ahh- the dark ages... I remember installing servos to drill gearboxes and boasting about having "two speed" transmissions! Back then you really had to be innovative in your designs to even make things work. Taking a motor spinning at 20kRPM and somehow getting it down to a speed and torque that could be used was often the pinnacle of your machine's design, especially if your team was short on mentors. My rookie year doing FIRST I remember our team U-bolted drill motors to our frame and used chains to drive our wheels- we had no idea what "side load" meant and paid the price throwing chains every match

Things are much easier now. With just a little money you can log onto VEX or AM, find what you need in the gear ratio of your choice and in a couple days you've got a mechanism running. Sometimes I really do think things are too easy these days. The sort of problem solving and creative thought that used to go into designing a gearbox for a mechanism is somewhat lost.

Any Canadians on here remember Canada First? (Canadian spinoff of FIRST before they crossed the border)

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by fox46

Any Canadians on here remember Canada First? (Canadian spinoff of FIRST before they crossed the border)

I remember hearing about it, often in a negative light. 188 spent a few years in that competition before becoming the first FRC team in Canada in 1998. (See here for details.)

On the bright side, test-driving Woburn's 1997 robot was a major factor in getting me to join the team.

[fox46]

I remember hearing about it, often in a negative light.

Yup, "negative" would be accurate- that thread pretty much covers all the bases. I don't believe they were affiliated with FIRST at all. Unfortunately for Canadian teams who couldn't afford to travel to the states, it was all there was back then and although it wasn't nearly as well-run or set up as FIRST, it did serve to inspire and motivate many youth in its day.

[JamesCH95]

At first, there was nothing.

And then Andy said: let there be decent COTS parts for FIRST!

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by JamesCH95

At first, there was nothing.

And then Andy said: let there be decent COTS parts for FIRST!

And somehow we still got the 2007 KOP transmissions...

(They were from BB)

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

And somehow we still got the 2007 KOP transmissions...

(They were from BB)

We all make mistakes

[Tytus Gerrish]

Bosch Drill transmissions with servo gear changes.

[ebmonon36]

We spend a lot of time designing and perfecting our omni-wheels.

We started using Knex wheels as the rollers:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/16984

Those were replaced with plastic rollers:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/17047

The two layers of carbon fiber (legalized in 2004) were eventually replaced with a single sheet of aluminum and plastic rollers replaced with rubber...and then we switched to AndyMark.

We used the Bosch drill transmissions in 2003 and 2004, Nothing But Dewalts (3 speeds!) from 2005 to 2007. I can remember rebuilding the Bosch transmissions every 2-3 matches at IRI in 2003. We had a horrible time with those.

Our frames were 80/20 for our first two years, a modified IFI kit frame in 2005, and in 2006 we designed our first sheet metal chassis.

Mike Trapp of Waterjet Cutting of Indiana began helping us in 2004 so we had the advantage of getting custom aluminum sprockets and gears cut for us.

[Mr. Van]

The primary reason that teams have difficulty "doing" FRC is that they design beyond their abilities. And they should.

When teams (and individuals) push the envelope, they are bound to fail, but hopefully they learn. It would be a great shame if many teams that are "struggling" stopped doing so and simply became "support" teams for those who can really "play the game".

FRC is a game of mentors. The best teams are guided by mentors who know how to balance on the knife edge of pushing the envelope and achieving success.

As for the "days before AM", I remember the challenges of just getting a drive system working in the days of Small Parts, extruded aluminum and a single 4' x 8' sheet of 1/2" plywood.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

[Andy A.]

I started in 2001. At the time I think Small Parts inc. was still the 'prefered' supplier. It's a little foggy, but I think you could buy from other suppliers as long as something equivalent was in SPI. Naturally, at the time, our corner of the woods didn't have anything like a Home Depot nearby. I think we had just gotten a Walmart. It was pretty rough.

Robots were a great deal more reliant on the KOP, but there was also a lot of interesting things in there that don't show up anymore. All your motors came in the kit, and lot of them had associated gearboxes and power transmission parts. Getting spares for KOP items was tough and teams traded a great deal (not using your FP motors? We'll trade you our window motors for them...). A big part of success was figuring out how to utilize the KOP and SPI catalog to maximum effect.

I've rewatched match videos from the early 2000s recently and I'll agree with JVN. Robots were slower, clumsy and the games ended up being dominated by some game breaking strategy. In 2002 95 had a 8fps robot and that was fast (two wheel drive with corner skids!). A 15+fps robot back then would have been thought impossible (and, with 30 amp breakers and a 60 amp main it'd have been challenging at best).

There were also lot of scissor lifts. Like, a lot of them. I have no idea why.

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by Mr. Van

The primary reason that teams have difficulty "doing" FRC is that they design beyond their abilities. And they should.

When teams (and individuals) push the envelope, they are bound to fail, but hopefully they learn. It would be a great shame if many teams that are "struggling" stopped doing so and simply became "support" teams for those who can really "play the game".

I respectfully disagree with this mindset.

[rant]
The most inspiration-creating thing for any team that I have seen has always been success on the competition field. However, you did not reference "inspiration", you were talking about "learning", so I will talk about that instead.

In my time in FRC, the lion's share the big learning moments that I have had have come from continuous iterations on designs, not from spectacular fails. Sure, I learned things from these failures, and some of them were certainly necessary for my advancement. However, I should not strive to fail just for the learning opportunity, but rather take my small failures in stride as I incrementally build up my knowledge.

I see no difference for FRC teams.

Many, many teams build beyond their abilities. They often do not realize that their robot will not perform successfully until after their first qualification match. They struggle through competition, do not get selected for elims, then pack up and go home. Maybe when they get back, they look at their robot, and learn a small handful of things about why the design failed.

Then there are the teams that, from day 1 of build, choose less aggressive designs. These teams build robots to play these unglorifying "support" roles that everyone seems to look down upon, but which nevertheless are crucial for successful alliances. These teams may actually get a chance to test out their designs in week 5, and when these designs fail for an unexpected reason, the team still has a week to work out the bugs. These are the teams go to competitions, win more matches than they lose, and get picked for elims. The kids walk away proud that they were successful, and they have probably learned more than the average team, because they had dozens of small failures along the way, each of which required a unique solution.

Why in the world do so many people think that the first team I described is better off than the second? The teams that build "support" robots will still work to tweak, iterate, improve, and practice with these designs, just like any other team. The "chair" as an inbounding device (love it) is not an endpoint, but a starting point. Most teams never even reach their starting point because they strive too hard for the complicated designs.

(Clearly, not all teams fall into one of the above two categories, I illustrate these because I think that the sole difference between the two is the mindset of the leaders on the teams)

[/rant]

I would be surprised if my team didn't build "support role" type robots for the next 2 years, and maybe longer. I'd like to see someone try to tell any one of my kids that they were less inspired or that they learned less this year than the students on other teams who actually built shooters. They will probably laugh right in this person's face.

[Peter Matteson]

Having been a mentor through some of the dark days before cots rules were loosened and kit bot created I can say those items have elevated play in ways I can't even begin to describe.

In 2003-2004 my first years as a mentor the question of whether or not we had partners that could move every match was a valid concern because lots of teams tried crazy things in their drives that just wouldn't work. Robots would throw chains from missaligned axles regularly it was a world of difference.

Once teams could "drive out of the box" and spend 6 weeks developing a mechanism the quality of robots go signifcantly better and you had far fewer concerns about heather your partner could move, and started figuring out how you could work together.

Also to respond to the questions about IFI getting into COTS, they made and distributed the original JVN/Copioli kitbot in 2005. To the best of my knowledge that started them selling COTS parts on the mechanical side.

[Old Guy]

Small Parts Catalog from 1996 with the winning robot from Ramp N Roll.
Some day I will tell you how this machine was involved in the creation of the term "Gracious Professionalism"