Our team recently discovered that the panels for the mountain that we bought from Andymark had two different sides. One was glossy, and the other was not so glossy. I looked online for an answer but couldn’t find one. Does anyone know the orientation of the panels?
Does the glossy side happen to have a plastic film on it? If it was packaged like ours was, one side had a (white?) opaque covering, and the other had a transparent covering with a couple black arrows on it.
We removed both coverings.
The FTC Q&A Forum has released the following information about the glossy vs non-glossy panel sides in this post:
CoF
Originally Posted by FTC9915
[quote]We have tested our robot on our team’s Res-Q mountain from Andymark, and found we were able to climb our own blue and red painted panels effectively. Over the weekend our team went to a “Build Day” at our state FIRST organization’s field house. On the Andymark mountain at our state’s facility, we were unable to achieve sufficient traction to climb. The panels seemed slipperier than our teams’ own panels. Questioning our state’s volunteer officials, they indicated that the panels were slipperier on one side than the other, and that they had chosen to put the slippery side up, to provide a greater challenge to the teams.
Has this difference between the apparently identical sides of the panels been noticed elsewhere, and what is the appropriate assembly configuration? It seems like this may be a somewhat subtle difference, but one which could have a lot of influence on the performance of robots on the mountain. We are considering partially dismantling our mountain to see if flipping the panels makes a difference in our robot’s climbing performance.
If there is a difference in the two panel surfaces, how can the difference be determined in the field, and what is the proper configuration for tournaments?
Team 9915
Both sides of the panels used on the Mountains were measured and tested. The difference in the coefficient of friction was so nominal that it was determined either side could be used with little to no difference in game play.[/quote]
That answer makes no sense. The guy clearly says that they could go up one, and not the other. We have the same problem. The CoF is definitely different…but I guess we’ll have to work with the slippery side.