This is so insightful. No “magic”, just hard, hard work.
On the January 9th page, you posted your final drivetrain speed. When I run those calculations through the JVN calculator I only get 100% efficient speeds of 18.92 ft/sec and 6.81 ft/sec, whereas the blog posting shows 19.8 ft/sec and 7.1 ft/sec.
What would explain the difference?
I used CIMs at 5310 rpm free speed and the gearing showed on the blog posting.
Thanks.
This is an incredibly huge insight for anyone that it’s new to. This is typically how industry moves. Why did XYZ make that inane decision in their latest iteration of product instead of using a blanket ‘best practice’? In any complex integrated system (robot, submarine, satellite, cars) it’s usually for backwards-compatibility.
We used 5550 rpm free speed. Our measured efficiency on the bench ended up being 90-95% with a free speed of about 18.5 ft/sec with no weight on the wheels.
BIG Kudos and BIG Thanks to 254 for sharing!
I really appreciate getting a glimpse into your world class program and the building of your BEAUTIFUL machines.
Keep up the fantastic work.
Thanks again!
-John
This is very insightful and will definitely impact some of the things we do during our build season.
Thank you for sharing this invaluable resource with us!
Will the poofs be posting a 2012 build log? =)
Probably not. This year’s blog was pretty light and not to our usual standards. We plan to fix that for next year and make it public again.
Just so everyone knows, when I tried to visit the website, I got this message from Chrome:
Google has found malicious software may be installed onto your computer if you proceed. If you’ve visited this site in the past or you trust this site, it’s possible that it has just recently been compromised by a hacker. You should not proceed, and perhaps try again tomorrow or go somewhere else.
We have already notified team254.com that we found malware on the site. For more about the problems found on team254.com, visit the Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page.
I can verify that, I was looking at their site yesterday and had a fun 30 minutes removing the anti-malware scam software it installed, windows defender didn’t catch it. Their site has been compromised.
Yeah, we realized this morning that our site had been compromised and our webmaster cleaned it up today. Any malware should have been removed from the site and we have alerted Google that we have corrected the issue so they can remove the Chrome alert. If anyone sees any more issues now or in the future, please do let us know as soon as possible at website@team254.com.
Sorry for any inconvenience!
Just tried to enter your site and Google Chrome says it has malware.
Google has not yet cleared the warning. We are working with them to get it cleared.
Since you will not be releasing your build blog this year, I have a question for the poofs. Why did you make a long bot this year? (Not trying to be offensive we made one to)
Sorry to revive this post but my team is looking into possibly doing a build blog this season. Instantly I remembered this blog and wanted to show it to members to showcase a great example. I was disappointed to see that the link did not work. Have you guys taken this down permanently?
I don’t think this was intentional. We did some reorganizing of the website over the summer and something probably got lost in translation.
Okay, thanks for the fast update. Can’t wait to read through it again when its back up.
That was fast 
They’re back up.
Where can I find the ones from 2011/2010? Also, will a 2013 version be released?
http://www.team254.com/resources/ See “General Resources”
We need to clean up the 2013 blog prior to releasing it.