If you could Breakaway all over again...

[Tom Ore]

Overall we were pretty pleased with our robot. We had an excellent hanger (altough it took us probably 7 or 8 seconds to hang minimum.) We could cross the bump easily at any speed. We often scored two balls from the far zone in autonomous.

I think our biggest weakness was the ball roller. I think we were contacting too high on the ball which made the downward force too high.

Another potential improvement is that we didn't change anything on the robot from the time we bagged. We won KC, had a narrow loss in the finals at 10,000 lakes and a narrow loss in the quarterfinals on Newton. All this with the robot exactly as bagged (except of maintenance) at the end of the build season. Had we worked on the ball roller during the competion season we likely could have done a bit better. I'm on the fence about this. I like calling the robot done on the last day of the build season and then seeing how our decisions work out - a bit sentimental maybe.

[Bjenks548]

Well for the past 3 years, 548 has worried too much about drive trains and forgone the actual game piece manipulation. Make a long story short, we made around 8 drive trains during the season, yes, we successfully built a new one each week with 2 in week one, and modified the competition one before states. With so much work put on the drive train, after 6 weeks of build, we had a linear kicker that was never tested, 2 hangers that didn't work, and no ball possessor. This resulted in copying a ball possessor from HOT team and our kicker breaking for our first full day of competition. Lucky for us our robot found a home in the near zone and played very well there, even though it was poorly designed for the mid zone. So with our team not having our final drive train till 10 weeks after the game announced, I'm wondering when other teams decide on the exact drive train they are going to use, I'm hoping next year to get it done by week one.