Summer Design Competition 2015

[DesignComp]

We are back, and this time with the summer design competition that everyone's been asking for. We've got a new game, a longer design period, and some new awards. A huge thank you to Koko Ed for inspiring this summer's game.

I'll try and keep this one short:

Taken from the last competition thread:

For those of you unfamiliar with the design competition, the basic idea is a group of friends and I have created our own FRC game in order to provide a challenge to the FIRST community to better prepare people for the strategic design and game analysis required at the beginning of the FRC season in hopes that participants will utilize what they have learned from the competition to make their 2016 FRC team perform at a higher level of play. Individuals (or groups of people) design their own complete robot to participate in this year's game, Quad Quidditch.

The manual for Quad Quidditch may be found here, and the game documents and CAD models may be found here (Solidworks) and here (STEP file).

Also taken from the last competition thread:

Each team of contestants must turn in a CAD design for their robot as well as written documentation detailing their robot, their strategies for the game, their strategic design and thought process. Basically anything in the normal season that cannot be portrayed simply via the CAD model would be helpful having in writing. It will help your score to have more documentation about your processes.

For the above, the written portions can be as short as you want (it's easier for us that way) - they don't need to be professional essays, we just need to be able to read them and understand your thought process / strategic design. Some aspects of the normal FRC game have been changed, so how you adapt to these changes in your strategy will have an affect on how you are scored.

This is a relaxed competition. Like hella relaxed. This means you don't need to be 100% complete with your CAD. Don't leave out subsystems, but nuts/bolts/shafts etc aren't required for judging. As long as your general design gets across and you can explain it in words, you will be able to be less attentive to minor details on design.

Our time frame for the competition has been increased. The competition starts today, June 1st, and ends on the 15th of August. Submissions will be accepted any time up until 11:59 on August 15th.

For submission, if you use Solidworks, Pack and Go your assembly and put the zipped folder in a folder with your documentation. Otherwise simply send a STEP file along with your documentation. Submissions should be emailed to DesignComp2015@gmail.com.

A final note about the rules: We have put a lot of work into developing the game manual, trying to be as thorough as possible while remaining concise. We have gotten as much outside opinion as we could, however there is still a chance that we may have missed something. We're not perfect, we're human, it happens. Ask any questions here, and we shall reply with official answers, and update the manual as needed. To prevent any confusion, we ask that you take the rules for how they are intended, and try to minimize any lawyering of them. There will always be ambiguity with interpretations differing person to person, but we hope that consistent and transparent communication between the community and this GDC will help make that less of an issue.

With that being said, thank you to everyone who has helped in developing this project, and to everyone who takes the time to compete in it. Good luck, and we won't see you at the competitions because this is all theoretical.