In the post-bag world, how has your approach changed?

After no-bag was announced, there was a lot of speculation about how a team’s approach to designing their robot might change. Some people said they would not be changing their approach, shooting for a similar complexity as previous years. Others said their teams would be slightly more ambitious, due to the large increase in available time.

We on 6672 Fusion Corps went with a slightly more ambitious design. Overall, it is much more capable than previous years, but that is due to a significant increase in team competence and machining ability.

By now, we have produced aprox 65% of our parts. We are getting electronics finished within a couple of days and have a goal of driving the robot with all but two subsystems this weekend. Then we will iterate until our first cometition week 2.

So, accounting for changes in team capabilities, how ambitious has your team been in choosing a design when compared to previous years?

  • Significantly more ambitious design
  • Slightly more ambitious design
  • Similar to previous years
  • Less ambitious than previous years

0 voters

Are you satisfied with your decision? Is it working?

  • yes
  • no

0 voters

When do you plan to finish your robot (or first working version)?

  • Before week 5
  • week 5
  • week 6
  • week 7
  • week 8
  • post- week 8

0 voters

Any comments about how your build season is going? I’d love to hear them.

Team 498 is hosting two scrimmages in Phoenix, the 15th and 22nd of Feb, and we plan to go to both of them…then our first competition is Week 3 (11-14 March). So far, we are treating build season just like any other year, except that we are not building a practice robot.

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Our build season has been shockingly smooth so far, and I’m just waiting for something to go horribly wrong and then I’ll be like, “Oh, right, this is FRC.”

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Our robot won’t be “finished” until right before champs…

The best part about no bag is continuous iteration and improvement. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about in a post-bag era.

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I don’t know how we did two identical robots before

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Palmetto being Week 1, the most we’ve indulged is letting our high goal design bake in the CAD oven a little longer than usual.

Our build season is pretty swell, in fact we’re ahead of schedule compared to previous years. Something that has been a benefit for us is knowing we have extra practice time.

We’re meeting less often per week and skipping any thoughts of a practice robot. We are investing the extra time in avoiding team burnout. It’s going well so far.

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We did the same thing. I find it remarkable how much more we get done in our four meetings, as opposed to the 6 day weeks of the past. We have completed our Power Cell manipulator, and our climber. We didn’t plan to do the control panel but our mechanical/electrical kids have time so we are now. Even I feel a large reduction in stress. More planning and less panic.

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We also dropped building a practice robot this year and spent the money on a better practice field.

David

We have a scrimmage on the Feb 15th so we have been trying to treat the season as the normal 6 week season. We were a little more ambitious with our design this year than we have been in the past so our robot likely won’t be the quality that we want it to be for our scrimmage. We are only going to one regional and its a week 6 regional so we are pretty confident we will be able to use that time to fine tune our robot.

We dropped Sunday afternoon sessions this season. They actually were quite well attended and productive but we felt we should throttle back a bit. Oh, I think we’ll have one or two in the home stretch.
This year the robot is way more complex than ever. And although we are not building an actual practice bot the robot exists currently in: A virtual state. A basic drive test bed for software. A “heavy” frame with most of the bells and whistles. And as of last night the cut parts for the “light” final machine.
We’ve been lucky so far with weather, last season was brutal. But the design complexity probably means we won’t be doing a Week Zero event.
I miss Bag and Tag.

TW

We also dropped Sunday meetings, but I’m looking to add them back in this week and next week and still have our own deadline of end of day 2/17.

Really thankful for the no-bag this year! It’s been nice having Sundays off to this point, and instead of being in complete panic mode, I’m in mild panic mode. Last week we cut some design requirements and have simplified our robot to make sure we show up with something week 2 that we think will be at least moderately good. Thinking about how we might try to improve between week 2 and 5. Our robot from the week 2 competition may end up becoming our practice bot after that competition…we’ll see how productive we are the next two weekends.

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