So from this looooong discussion, I see a lot of people afraid they’ll have not much/nothing to do next year if none of the mechanics of the game changes.
As a mentor I can’t see this being much further from the truth, but alas I only mentor on one team. We built our best bot in years, but already see a lot of engineering work ahead of us. (As an engineer irl, I re-engineer products on a consistent basis and it hasn’t gotten old yet)
Will only low resource teams/students be the only ones to benefit form this?
Have the top tier gotten it figured out?
Are you really done?
So without further ado, with the assumption that nothing changes for next season and you can reuse everything from this year…
I’ll just say this: 177 won a district event in week 2, and the last thing I recall some of our mentors saying is “I can’t wait to rip that robot apart.”
When we can safely meet I am excited for an extensive rebuild, as we had planned to do prior to the world turning upside down. In the meantime, boy am I glad we use OnShape.
<20% Percentile teams will creep along, and still be in the low angle “Slow beginning” slope. They will be roughly the same, or slightly better than they currently are.
20-40% Percentile teams will start to accelerate upwards. These teams will be moderately better than they currently are.
40%-60% Percentile teams will skyrocket up the steep learning curve, and become significantly better than they currently are.
60-80% Percentile teams will get somewhat better, but a much lower percentage than the 40%-60% teams.
80%+ Percentile teams will get somewhat better, but not much. Some teams will go to extreme lengths to try to get only 1% better.
Despite having one of if not our best robot for 2020, I see no world where we don’t continue to iterate and improve. Hopefully adding a turret, and potentially a skywalker. We’re in build season now gosh darnit let’s go to work! Driver practice will be key as well, and hopefully we can get access to our facility or another place to practice. Same thing with autos. I for one am very excited for the upcoming season.
Swapping your first 7 for a 19, we’re in almost exactly the same position. (OK, so Regional Finalist captain, so wildcard…) The kids wanted to start redesigning… but the mentors closed the shop for a couple days. Then Week 3 rolled around.
Palmetto was our third straight top-10 seeding (and a small event down here is 50 teams). We had to rip into that robot for Smoky to have any peace of mind, and indeed it’s stored for the summer half-disassembled.
(One student, who came from a VEX background, wanted to go further and build that high goal shooter for Smoky. We reined that in as too ambitious for us in that kind of timeframe, but I expect it’ll get a fresh look now.)
I haven’t talked much with the team yet about what we’re going to do, and I assume it depends on a lot of factors we don’t know yet like access and funding and if we get to meet up ever again. But for us I think this stuff is really cool.
We built a low goal robot that could hang. If we don’t have much time or money, we could just work on upgrading that robot, add a drop down intake or working on an automated indexing system. We already had plenty of improvements to consider for our 2nd event.
If we do get time and/or money, we can try and overreach a little bit! We could plausibly attempt to build a new robot that shoots in the 2 point goal, knowing we have a safe backup robot if we fail at the design challenge or fail to get funding or time. We never would have been able to attempt the high goal without this extra time and extra experience with the game piece.
While I have been initially against this decision and somewhat still am. However I know that there is so much you can do if you would like. If you needed new games every year that would mean battle bots wouldn’t exist.
Some brainstorming for an average/ slightly below average team (2nd year).
Make practice field
Add a turret to the shooter (probably GreyT)
3 ball wide intake that can actually intake balls fast
Wheel of fortune mechanism (I have a feeling they are going to make the wheel worth significantly more).
MAKE GOOD BUMPERS!!!
DRIVER PRACTICE!!!
Better vision with the limelight we purchased (I’, mechanical so idk much about that).
Fast belt drive/ indexing (7558 used duck tape and apparently it works really well)
Make a faster climber (currently at around 10 seconds with elevator climb).
Use CAD effectively. While we were really happy with our build with a consistent high shooter and elevator climb, we can always do better.
As for 254, 118,1678, etc, I am sure there gonna push it, you know 15 ball autos, triple climb, and bunch of extremely complex things for the fun of it.
Our situation almost exactly. A few students (one family) took home an old robot chassis and built a shooter within the first 2 weeks or so of ‘stay at home’. We will probably try to change to a shooter, but keep it modular so if it has problems, we can put the old ‘dumper’ back on and run with it. I think trying to do this in a modular way will be a GREAT experience for the students!
It will of course be up to the team, and to whatever working and playing restrictions lie ahead. From where I see it our design was actually quite good…but for various reasons we underestimated the amount of abuse we’d take from defense and it took an increasing toll as our week two event progressed.
So I’m thinkin’…total rebuild. Omni wheel/H-drive did not have enough benefits to redo…likely a West Coast drive or even KoP with mucho driver practice. Make the jump to Falcons. Swap the surprisingly accurate one wheel shooter for a dual wheel with range to fire from protected zones (which I think will be changed lest the game get too formulaic). Translating climber was pretty sweet, but could be made sweeter.
Oh, there’s enough to make it interesting for us. But I still don’t think it would be as good for the students as a totally new game. But you don’t always get to choose your challenges in this world…
T.Wolter 5826
(rarely listened to anyway, and to be honest the kids are right more often than the mentors)
