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Unread 13-04-2014, 14:03
IKE's Avatar
IKE IKE is offline
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Re: What are we doing wrong at MSC?

In the scouting seminar that Jim Z and I covered, one of the topics that we kept stressing was you have to scout your own team with as open of eyes as possible.
When I was the scouting mentor for 33, I would often have the "why didn't we get picked" conversation with teams, and they would often get very upset with me for telling them my perspective of the truth. The most common statement I heard from many teams is "we thought we would get picked earlier in the draft".... This tends to track with the "over-inflated" perception folks have about teams (I was just as guilty of this with 33 as the next team). The real thing is, it is easy to focus on your teams strengths, and shrug off a bad match, or dropped ball, or missed auton, or foul because you know the full story of what happened. Often scouts don't know the 100% story and thus that is relevant information.

I did not do thorough objective scouting at MSC this weekend, but watched a lot of matches, and know a lot of capabilities of teams. My guess (which aligns with earlier comments) was that 2959 was "on the bubble" for a lot of teams lists. I know this was true of 33's list last year as I helped make that one. Last year, you guys were awesome with the run and gun and pretty good with with the 10 point climb. You guys tended to shoot from the same "favorite" spot as 33 though which was a bit awkward in matches if the robots "got in sync". As was 314 at MSC and World's for 33 in 2013, but was edged out by other competitors (68 at MSC due to better defensive ability and 1519 at World's because they were an FSC with more height).

For 2014, 2959 was a really good machine with a pretty accurate shot. At least at Escanaba, your collector was slow*. I think it took about 3+ seconds to acquire a ball. Not sure if you put faster motors on for MSC (I believe it was window motors at Escanaba).
Also as others have stated, the pedestal style shooting mechanism could be bumped to cause you to drop the ball, and thuse require a new acquisition (see above). While this didn't occur often, it would occur anytime someone gave you a good hit, which in Elims is any time you get ready to shoot.

Other than that, it is like many others have said, the depth at MSC this year was great, and the parity of teams was quite broad as well. This meant that really another 5-10 robots likely would have been good picks (2959 included) to play in Elims. But as FIRST only lets you pick 1, that is all you can pick, and teams try to pick the ones that will work out best for them.

If you ever want objective advice on how to improve your robot, talk to the scouts of another team you respect after the event. During the event, they may not tell you all the details, but after an event, they will often give you a nice list of things to work on. The biggies are usually auto accuracy, piece manipulation, speed, traction, driving, defense, and strategic awareness tend to be the normal ones. By the back end of the draft, teams are usually deficient in some of these areas. Some years/robots, it is a specific design feature (type of wheels, long vs. short in 2012).

*If possible, for collecting a ball, you want the surface of your roller to be at 2X the ground speed you want to be able to collect at. IE for a 7 FPS drivetrain, a 14 FPS surface speed on the roller will really snap up the ball. You have to balance speed though with enough torque to do the action so that the collector doesn't stall. IE if you have a 15 FPS chassis, a 30 FPS collector is crazy fast and will likely stall.
Assuming a Window motor, and I think those collector wheels are around 4" diameter, the rollers likely spin at around 85 rpm. This would be roughly 1.5 revs/second which for a 4" roller is about 1.5 feet/second. The 2 foot diameter ball has to roll about 1/2 to 1 revolution to roll into a robot. This is 3 feet to 6 feet. At 1.5 FPS, collection would require 2-4 seconds to collect. If your robot was to intake the ball each of 4 cycles, the collection process would use 8-16 seconds of the match. If all 3 robots collected at this speed, 24-48 seconds of a 31 pt. cycle style of play would be bringing collecting. Possibly more if to pass you have to spit the ball back out the intake. I think your intake was faster than that, but still took a while to collect.

Last edited by IKE : 13-04-2014 at 18:07. Reason: Added collector speed details.
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