If you could do this game over

[Zzyzx]

Our robot would be faster, able to get onto the platform, and carry eight balls instead of just four...and being able to hang would be a nice bonus as well...but otherwise I feel our team had a very stong robot this year.

[Stephen Kowski]

we would have hung from the floor....if i could have done it differently that is

[Marc P.]

I'd have started autonomous programming much much sooner (as in, right about this time, heh). We ended up pushing it off until we had a completed drive train (which didn't happen until week 4 or 5), and even then, didn't come up with a concrete autonomous plan until week 6. As it turned out, we wired the banner sensors in a rush, so they weren't getting the required power, and thus not working properly until the second day of our only regional (when we discovered the problem). Coding was a mess too, basically thrown together by one person, minimal to no commenting at best.

I think we can only blame our own lack of organization, especially since I was supposed to be the lead programmer. However, I've been programming in BASIC/PBASIC for so long it's infused in my blood, so I had a rough transition to C (having never done a thing in C prior to this year.. should have started practicing much much earlier). Luckily we had a new member, incredibly bright, picked up C in a week, and did 95% of the code. We ended up with only a few bugs, and not much of an autonomous, but it got us through a regional and nationals, and gave us a wealth of experience to draw on for next year. Biggest thing I'd do over- learn C long before the 6 weeks started. Needless to say, I have our edu-bot and will be playing for most of the summer.

[minic@HYPER69]

If i could redo the season, the only thing i would have done is to brainwash the teachers and had my team go to NATS!

And lean how NOT to tip the robot!

[Avarik]

I would build a system to hang from the floor on our current robot...

Or, built a robot that goes onto the bar and shoots our thicker tubing or something...basically making it much harder to hang!

[LauraN]

Too much 80-20: Yes, 80-20 is cool. Very. But it's also very heavy. We had HUGE weight problems (meaning we actually tore off whole mechanisms about 2 days before ship) that we could have avoided if we made the base out of say, extruded aluminum. (That's the plan for next year, anyway.)

Gearbox Re-design: Our gearbox...just didn't fit with what we wanted to do. It was far too powerful and we ended up being very inefficient.

More thought into autonomous: Do I really need to elaborate? =) I must say we did make the most of our situation and turned our one auton mode (full foward) into some good strategy techniques.

Fewer pneumatics: Like 80-20, pneumatics are cool. But we had WAY too much of them. Our compressor just couldn't handle it. We had to extend all our pneumatics and then wait for the pressure to build up again. Also, when we attempted to hang, we had 2 pistons to retract. The first only moved in the vertical direction and was intended to be enough. Of course, that didn't work, and the second was based around a pivot point. Obviously that's pretty inefficient; when retracted, part of the retraction moved the arm in a horizontal direction, which was of no use to us. If I could do it over, I would create an arm controlled by motors/chains/sprockets etc that had one piston at the end which would only retract in the vertical direction. Hope that makes sense. =)

It seems like a lot, but I really was pretty please with our ability to improvise and use what we had to the best of our ability. And it's always good to learn stuff for next year.

[Alan Anderson]

I'd have gotten more of the students to do some "hands-on" programming, and I would have learned how to do a good PID control early on instead of waiting until Wednesday night before the Championship.

It would also have been a very good idea to put together a pseudo-robot having at least one motor-controlled arm with potentiometer feedback, so it would have been possible to write and test programs without having to use the actual 'bot. Trying to negotiate robot time between hardware and software maintenance tasks was always more, um, interesting than it needed to be.

[MikeDubreuil]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Trying to negotiate robot time between hardware and software maintenance tasks was always more, um, interesting than it needed to be.

Welcome to the world of being a FIRST programmer. Where software development happens in the same fashion as a Big Mac at McDonald's. Let's only hope your code has less fat

This year my the mechanicals were becoming annoyed with what was being accomplished in the pits. I claimed, "We have to write, test, debug, test, debug, test, repeat until new functionality is added." We can't just write something and expect it to run. When I took a stopwatch and recorded the amount of time we were able to test software on the robot, the time came to less than 10 minutes between matches.

It's important to stress that software development requires testing and tweaking. It usually takes about 20 minutes of writing (which can be done standalone), and then 20 minutes of tweaking which requires you to have access to your robot. If you don't get enough time, use a stop watch.

It's very common to lose track of time while working on the robot so it's important to know exactly how much time is being alloted to tasks. Show the appropriate person, your pit chief for example, and tell him I had X amount of time, and really need to have more time to get the job done right.

[Coco the Monkey]

It blows your mind. It is designed to blow your mind. The game is introduced in the winter, when everything else is ending, and it blossoms in the spring, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as you watch all your hard work pay off, it stops and leaves you to face summer alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of gears and motors alive, and then just when the days are lengthening, when you need it most, it stops. This is life. This is FIRST.

I would only have changed one thing about our robot, I'm proud of our robot and how well it competed this season.

I'd have made it a little more GREEN!!!

[Alex Pelan]

-Had our drivers practice more (or rather practice with) the arm before the competition...anyone at UTC saw the negative effects of this.
- Met more people from other teams at nationals
-As for the actual game, as a designer I would have made the "bonus ball" be worth 10 points if you knocked it off. It was too much work for not enough bonus to bring it into the field while knocking it off, and then shooting it. Even if you got it to your human player, there still was the possibility of a miss.