pic: 971 Friction Clutch Transmission Insides

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by T^2

I wonder, though, if time wouldn't be better spent on low-hanging fruit -- some mentors and I made a lively discussion of this a few months ago when talking about how 1678 could improve our competitiveness. I know 971's bots always have high score ceilings, but often fail to execute to full potential. Would not it be more efficient to ensure basic functionality in each match, as opposed to some fantastic and some mediocre matches, rather than build a smoother autoshifter? (This isn't to say that both of these improvements couldn't happen simultaneously, of course.)

Perhaps someone from 971 could chime in here.

We are working on that too, but a lot of that is very game specific, so it's hard to address with specific projects in the off-season. We've had a very detailed discussion of the robot issues last year and how to avoid them again. I will also say that there has been a conscious choice during build to go for riskier designs with higher potential the past few seasons.

This was one of several off-season projects, one of the others being a 3rd robot, HP-load only for Ultimate Ascent that we ran at Madtown. That was designed and built almost entirely by freshman and sophomores, with some help from the upperclassmen. The friction clutch is a lot cooler, and I don't know of anyone else in FRC who has tried to make one as a replacement for the dog shifter, so we thought it would be more interesting to CD.