Is 12 hours enough?

[KenWittlief]

I dont know if I would call this 'completely redo'ing' the robot.

The sprocket change sounds reasonable, but keep in mind by making it faster you will lose torque and ramp climbing / pushing power. You might get it all changed over and discover your robot has trouble moving from a dead stop, can no longer turn without playing morse code on the breakers... You will have very little test and debug time, and you may end up putting it back the way it was to begin with.

As for the shooter, you have a rules issue. If you did not ship the shooter with the robot, and it has not stayed with the robot from regional to regional then I dont think you can show up at the championship with the whole subassembly. The rules clearly state that you must ship the entire robot by the ship date. Any thing you add after that must be fabricated during the fix-it windows, and assembled at the event itself.

So even if you did build the shooter before ship date, and removed it before it was shipped, I dont think you can now legally bring it to any event.

you could bring the raw materials and fabricate another one just like it at the championship. That will be legal, and much more difficult to accomplish.

[Heretic121]

well the shooter is on the robot we can shoot as is... the turret is on the robot as is just the motor is not connected to it so it stays stationary....

i do realize we will lose some pushing power by changing the sprokets but we all noticed that we were incredibly slow compared to most teams at UTC and we feel that a small speed increase will help us more so than that small lose in torque... but its not really torque we are giving up are we? because the motor is still pushing out the same but just raw pushing power will be affected *im not an engineer by anymeans and not that good in physics =P*...

and yes Tim... i remeber that team back in 04.... they were in our division... crazy story that still gets brought up even today... so yes it is doable just hopefully our team gets motivated...

[KenWittlief]

ok, when you said the turrent was scrapped out, I thought you meant literallly

if the parts are all there then I would give it your best shot. Have a time schedule for the tasks that need to be performed and accept that if you fall behind schedule at some point, or hit a show-stopper, you might need to revert back to the way it was.

This is one of those engineering trade-off situations. By changing your robot you are taking a risk that something might go wrong, you might not be done in time (miss your practice matches or not able to play in some of the seeding rounds), or there might be some un-expected adverse side effect created (that makes the bot worse in the end).

and at the same time if you are successful then you will have a better robot on the field. The deciding factor is whether the gain (reward) is worth the risk.