Biggest Obstacles to Effective Design

[ouellet348]

In a very informal setting, i.e. CD, I wanted to collect some opinions on what teams feel the biggest obstacle to their design process is of the topics below:

• Technical Expertise
• Organized Design Process
• Resources e.g. software, hardware
• Technical Support
• Organizing Data Across Assemblies
• Organizing Data Across Team Members

Feel free to throw out any other issues you have. Thanks for the input.

[Dan Petrovic]

Our biggest obstacle is prioritizing game functions. Part of that comes from being unable to accurately gauge the difficulty of certain functions.

To use Recycle Rush as an example, we vastly underestimated the capabilities of other teams and built a specialist robot because we felt that only "The 1%" would be able to reliably build capped stacks by themselves.

[Michael Hill]

Organizing data across assemblies. I couldn't even tell you how much time I had to spend reintegrating parts with SolidWorks. Too many external references in assemblies causing all sorts of havoc trying to integrate an actual assembly. Combining that with top-down design being so advantageous, it's a nightmare. It got to the point to actually have an assembly that worked well, I had to open some assemblies in a certain order.

[AdamHeard]

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

Beat me to it. More to the point, I would say "feelings".

[ouellet348]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Organizing data across assemblies.

There is truth in that external references are the devil.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Dan Petrovic

Our biggest obstacle is prioritizing game functions. Part of that comes from being unable to accurately gauge the difficulty of certain functions.

Same here, though I wouldn't call it an obstacle so much as a flaw. We have improved slowly over the years in predicting what other teams will do and responding appropriately. For example, we realized that the HP station would be utilized by most of the top end teams, and went for a landfill specialist that could also flip totes and work from the step. However, even on Einstein, the inverted totes and totes on the step didn't become as important as we thought they would. Our biggest flaw this year was in not realizing how much alliance partners will get in your way, and second was not so much a design as an implementation flaw in that we never got our stacks to consistently interlock, requiring too many trips. We did a lot better in practice than on the field, even though we did mimic the layout of the field pretty closely.

[kgargiulo]

Originally Posted by ouellet348

There is truth in that external references are the devil.

More specifically, it is unintended external references that can hurt you. Sometimes the external reference really is your design intent. The CAD program shouldn't make your life hard to recover from the former or enable the latter.

I don't know SW, but Creo lets you control (warn or outright prevent) the creation of external references. Also there is visibility into the references you have created. SW may have similar features, I don't know.

Disclaimer - I work for PTC.

[ouellet348]

Originally Posted by kgargiulo

More specifically, it is unintended external references that can hurt you.

Fair. The issue with using any software program when you're self taught is that best practices come about from trial and error more so than a conscious logical choice. Many new users come across external references issues whereas in industry it's far less of an issue due to formalized training and best practices being taught. Even lacking those, most companies have some sort of standardized procedure or design philosophy in place.

[IronicDeadBird]

Biggest obstacle hands down for me is waiting for information.
When you are designing for a static game it is really easy to come up with a game plan and run it when the rules don't change like in Chess you can try an opening against a bunch of different openings because the rules are static. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending upon my temper) FRC games are fluid and dynamic and the rules change. Once that happens then the game mechanics change, then designs and strategies for games need to be re analyzed. So the biggest obstacle for me when trying to design something is the resource and information gathering aspect.
Maximum respect to the GDC for having a Q&A system, and for keeping regular updates but the fact that what is viable day 1 and what is viable day 21 can vastly differ throws a major wrench in the works. The biggest time sink I had this year was when the game first came out I was like "lol Ill just drop anchors into the step bins and pull them all into the auto zone for resource denial and multiple bin sets points." It was a simple really powerful opening to a match and it would dictate a lot of design rules. But I had to wait for the Q&A because I needed to know if multiple bin sets could exist. When the Q&A went live they said "yeah no, one set" and also someone caught the technicality I found where the landfill zone was an area and the GDC made it into a volume and I was really sad...

TLR The games tendency to change is the biggest obstacle

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

Especially when they refuse to admit to themselves that they made mistakes, then take responsibility and say "we messed up, our bad"

Do this and you will do much much better. You can't do better if you don't have a way to do it.

[rsisk]

Our problem tends to be going from idea to design. Most of the team have great ideas with no clue how to design them.

We also struggle with the team members that argue "your idea is to difficult to do, so we do it my way" followed by an occurrence of my first issue, idea -> design struggles.

[Newo]

The biggest problem my team faced this past year was over complication. We ended up running very short on time because our complex parts took a long time to machine. I think often something can look really great in the CAD model, but it's worthless if you don't actually have the resources to create it within a reasonable amount of time.

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Beat me to it. More to the point, I would say "feelings".

Originally Posted by BrennanB

Especially when they refuse to admit to themselves that they made mistakes, then take responsibility and say "we messed up, our bad"

Do this and you will do much much better. You can't do better if you don't have a way to do it.

All of this.
If the team buys in to a specific culture and design and goals, you are a thousand times more likely to succeed than if people don't buy in and don't cooperate.

"A [FIRST Team] divided against itself cannot stand."
Paraphrased from Abe Lincoln

[The_ShamWOW88]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Unfortunately for most teams it's people.

I would say more specifically it's personalities and the many strong "opinions" which throw snags into the design process.