FRC125 - The NUTRONs- 2016 Reveal

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

The strategy in its simplest form is boiled down to two design types:

1. Build for replaceability
2. Build it 'beefatronic'

No one asked for my input on this but I feel inclined to throw it out there anyway.

The traditional event structure definitely wore us out over the last few years. The idea of throwing as much as you can on the robot and figuring it out later obviously never worked for us except in 2013 and 2014 where we pushed the withholding system to its absolute limits and, especially in 2014, delivered a robot at Championships that was quite literally 100%+ different from the one we put in the bag.

This year in a never-ending quest to show everyone how insane we are, we signed up for three district events for no good reason (and don't tell anyone on 422 this but I was also eyeing either the Week 1 or Week 5 NC district). This opened up the opportunity to expand upon lessons learned in 2014 that were then obviously and succinctly discarded for 2015. We ended up running what can be the FRC equivalent of Agile Project Management, where we have a deliverable on a major system every single week of the season. We had a robot that we could have taken to our first event and won by the end of our first build cycle (Week 3... we lost a week to snow). We had a better version of that two weeks later and turned the first one into our development robot. Getting a base for practice and competition done this early was a first for us and a victory for the agile way we wanted to approach the season because it allowed our drive team, programming team, and fabrication to figure out what to expect in March and April.

Now we are using our unbag time to the fullest extent possible by the rules. We plan to work on building a third chassis over our next 3-5 unbag windows since it is a rather simple design that has undergone trivial iterations, the work can be done in parallel to our unbag work, and since it is only worked on during open bag, does not count toward our withholding allowance. Our closed bag shop time is being used to iterate on the more specialized subsystems.

I hope this all pans out because I have had a lot of fun this year running this kind of system and we finally got student engagement up to a level that we like.

TL;DR we know that by playing anywhere between 60-80 matches before we get an invite to St Louis that we will have to build an entirely different robot over the next 9 weeks, so we're doing just that. It's good to know that we are somewhat close to that.

Your robot is the robot we wanted to build (tiny) but we couldn't really get it a way everyone would be comfortable under the constant iteration of everything. I hope it does well because it's pretty dope.