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Re: How much do you design before kickoff?
Our team has never had something truly designed before offseaon.
In a way we 'design' our autonomous program in the preseason when we learn how to do something that would improve our performance. For example, myself and another kid on our team are trying to learn how to program wheel encoders using interrupts. Since this is rather time consuming, we would rather start 'designing' this aspect of our robot ahead of time so that we will be prepared.
We do prototype a new transmission, because most likely the requirements for it will remain the same from year to year. When we prototype, it is almost like testing out a hypothesis: we test what we predicted would be a good design, and we observe the results. If we like the results, then we will keep the design. However, if we don't like it or feel that something new or different should be added to it, we generally end up revising it during build season. So even though it's kind of like designing...it isn't really a true pre-kickoff design because it may end up getting revised.
I like to call it 'testing a hypothesis', rather than 'pre-season design', just because everything can be subject to change.
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Florida Institute of Technology
Ocean Engineering, '12
Last edited by Jaine Perotti : 02-12-2004 at 19:29.
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