PNW robotics teams, what'd you think of the district model?

[dtengineering]

I only made it out to the Mount Vernon district, but I was pretty impressed. Teams got lots of playing time at a venue closer to their homes and in a more compact, intimate venue. In a lot of ways it felt very much like the 2008 Seattle Regional in Tacoma, which was one of my favorites.

I can't, however, begin to imagine the volunteer effort that went into making this work. To keep everything running for seven straight weekends... wow. Every bit of awesomeness was paid for by the sweat and lost sleep of the key volunteers.

As for the 400W power limit, I've often thought it would be interesting if FIRST put some kind of limitation on the total energy that a robot can consume in the course of an event. It would make energy management and monitoring and efficient gearing and design very important... and would make pushing matches very, very expensive. Right now batteries and electricity are pretty much viewed as an unlimited resource... it would be interesting to see the creative solutions that teams would come up with.

Anyway, I was only able to experience the event as a volunteer this year... but I would have loved to have had my old team taking part. The district system really seems to be rather awesome.


Jason

[Dunngeon]

For our first district event at Oregon City we ran up against the charging limit big time. We go through a battery a match because our robot can only go at match speeds for 4 minutes off of a single battery ( 2 matches = 5 minutes). This meant with the higher number of matches, we ran through our 8 batteries quickly, and eliminations saw us run out in Semi's. Luckily other team's loaned us batteries (shout out to 997 and 847) and we survived Oregon City. For OSU we bought 2 more and switched our chargers to 6 amp to cope with the increased throughput that was required. Overall it worked well and we have no complaints, but more power would be nice because more chargers could be run, in turn allowing us to charge at 2 amps and increase the life of our batteries.

[dtengineering]

Perhaps a little device like the Kill a Watt would be handy in the pits.

http://www.rpelectronics.com/p4400-k...wer-meter.html

They come in power bar format as well, so a team could intelligently manage their pit power consumption.

Jason