Observations/tips from driving week 1. Some of things may have been said in other threads, or be obvious, but hopefully it is helpful to others.
- This is by far the worst game for sight lines. FIRST must have decided to make all drivers lives as hard as possible. The draw bridge is the worst thing ever created:)
- This is the most involving game I have seen between scouting and driveteam. Both groups must work very well together to put out the proper set of defenses to slow down the other alliance, while also allowing your alliance to be able to see.
- This held true for our team that before the representative submits the defense configuration he or she should check with driveteam to make sure that the placement of defenses does not interfere with sight lines for the strategy of the match. We learned this the hard way when we were in drive station 1 and we put the drawbridge right in front of us and then the other alliance put out the drawbridge as well and we could no longer see the left half of the field well.
- Autonomous will win you qualification matches. Those few points decided many matches and are the difference between being ranked 4 or 20.
- Climbing is by far the biggest factor for winning in early weeks of competition. Huge shout out to skunkworks 1983 for their win today. They have a lighting fast climber(I’d say probably 5 seconds or less including lining up) Their climber was the difference for their alliance and allowd them to win many of their matches. In a qualification match they were the only robot on their alliance on the field. They single handedly breached every defense, then scaled and won by less than 5 points to help secure them the number one seed.
- Robots shooting from the batter or such areas will likely not be good options in another week or two. With defense in eliminations at Auburn mountain view some of the best shooters in the competition were limited to only one or two goals in a match.
- Lining up to shoot without vision is very difficult. The best places to do so without vision are the corner of the field where a spy bot would start. We got this shot to work pretty well and could make some of the time with heavy defense. When lining up to shoot from the batter the easiest way to line up is to align your wheels with the strips of tape running down the batter on the two foot wide pieces on the batter and then back down if you are shooting from the edge.
- Be careful of your shooter being too powerful. We had 5 balls go into the goal and then bounce off of the chains back out of the goal throughout the competition.
- As it has been said before, breaching is the most important part of this game for qualification matches. The ranking point is vital.
- Before teams run autonomous you should always check to make sure your alliance partners have their robots turned the correct direction. We had a few matches where our partners drove the wrong direction during auto and hit opposing alliance robots.
- Probably one of the most intense matches in elimination matches at Auburn Mountain View for the number one alliance. http://youtu.be/BbZzX3ukycU