There were some really intense fights over resources. Our intake basically needs to be completely rebuilt for St. Louis. Going after that rebound in your own court yard can get competitive…
Dozer is back this year. Check out the 1:00 mark of 319’s reveal video. You can also see us in St. Louis this year.
YES…we build durable bots…this year we broke eight times
We’re spoiled by years of flat field games with no obstacles. People have gradually been moving their drivetrains closer and closer to the margins of strength assuming every game would have 4" wheels, simple obstacles, not jumping over things, etc. and this game threw all of that away. As a result, 16T sprockets, 25 chain drives, etc. are failing everywhere and people are saying the game is rough, when really the designs didn’t adjust for the rigors of the game.
None of these three decisions are bad in a vacuum this year, but when it rains, it pours.
Most brutal game I’ve seen in my 15 years of doing FIRST. The field is breaking robots while robots are breaking the field and now robots are starting to break each other. It’s gonna get worse in St. Louis. Alot worse!
Unfortunate. When we were building our drive train, more than half the team called us “stupid” for spending so much time securing everything and implementing backup systems, (for example if one bolt breaks, there were 3 more supporting it). We were one of the very few bots that didn’t break down at either of our events.
Luckily, the only broken parts we had were this gear and a bent piece of 1x1 angle. That being said, this game is brutal to robots. Around the same time we had the bent angle incident, our hex shaft for the intake slipped out of it’s collars and bearings after another robot hit us so we drove around for a match with it hanging in the robot.
Our robot got demolished (exadriateing a little) our first comp we broke 5 chains over several matches, one whole side at one point. Our POT mount for our arm broke 2 times, our cam bus got disconnected during a match. our roll cage got rolled up on by another bot in the quarter finals, our orange light mount got completely meshed up. our wheel trusses got bent like crazy, (one was in a ‘s’ shape). our shooter ball guiders got bend ever flipping match, we lost our camera during our semi match (we didn’t need it though) and our support bracket that tied our robots frame at the front, got bent so it looked like this |||| –> //\ or \__// ( ||,\, // ) ‘are the wheel sides of the robot’
The difficulty with this particular game stems more from the fact that teams’ institutional memory of games before RR has failed. AA was rougher in robot-to-robot interaction, while Stronghold is rougher in terms of vertical drops and robot-to-field interaction. RR taught new students that FRC robots could be lightly built and survive, which is one of the longer lasting shames about that game.
And bumpers. There were basically 3 years worth of students on teams who had never had to build a robust bumper. (Let alone compliant with the rules…)
This statement confuses me. Surely students who competed in Aerial Assist would have some memory of how to build robust bumpers.
A one year gap is a lot of time to forget.
It really is, and plus Aerial Assist simply didn’t have that much brute force on either the frame or the bumpers (I’ve been told). Most of the bumpers I saw falling off, happened when the robot hit a defense the wrong and got stuck.
Tell me, (I wasn’t a part of aerial assist) did bumpers fall off often in aerial assist?
The portcullis managed to break the 3/16 polycarbonate rails we intended for it to slide on when our driver hit it at almost full speed. It went up, hit its stops hard and then Newton took over with one of those pesky laws. Snapped the poly right off.
Took a hit so hard at champs in AA that the drive rails on our WCD bowed outwards and all the rivets mounting the drive rails to the bellypan sheared.
I’m not share if this belongs here exactly, and if it doesn’t, feel free to let me know, I’m new to chief Delphi- anyways, a few problems that we have had this year:
Generally, the robot is actually holding up pretty well this year- we only had a few problems, and only three of them actually effected our matches
-aluminum rivets on the front of our bot all suffered absolute failures, we replaced them with steel rivets and had no problems(no effect in matches, just a really bouncey electrical board)
- we burned out a CANTalon somehow, (we think that it was a lemon) and it took down our entire CANBus. Fortunately we were on the batter when it happened(we did end up missing a match while we tried to find which component actually burned out, everything still had its lights on so we had to manually test each part)
-A bearing on our climber failed, causing the climber to stop working
-Our robot uses one shaft to rotate itself above the low goal. We use a 3/4" water-hardened steel shaft to do so. We twist it. It actually twists about 60° every 12 matches, when we usually swap a new one in- but for MSC we didn’t swap it out at all, and we had no problems with it
- CTRE’s 18 gauge ferrels don’t properly fit our 18 gauge wire, so we switched to 16 gauge ferrels and crimped them tight… Only problem is that the electronics seem to put too much pressure on them, causing them to break off inside of our Power distribution board, pneumatics control module, and voltage regulator- irreparably. (We lost radio power in a match due to that one)
Our robot has been roughed up a lot…
-The camera kept falling under our mount at St joe. Fixed by moving it back from the mount.
-The outer walls on our aluminum tubing began bowing out in several spots. Fixed with steel brackets inside tubing.
-The pvc guides for our shooter broke out during a match at St joe… Replaced with aluminum for traverse city
Aluminum piece of customized kit chassis under battery bent after every finals match in st joe… Replaced with steel for traverse city
Hubs for our polycord belts on our intake broke from hitting the low bar. Made a bracket to protect it…
-main shooter backplate began to bend slightly at traverse city and then failed completely when our guides hit the berm at MSC… Replaced with our firmer backup. (But have to lift shooter when crossing berm… Who knew it would be our hardest defense at states?:yikes:)
That’s all I can think of right now but we fixed every issue we could and tried to make sure it couldn’t happen again. 
Finally did a full inspection of our bot today. Apparently some how, somewhere the transmission on the left side completly cracked and one of the 3 motors was dangling loose… I suspect if we had played even one more match, something bad would have happened.
We used what we called the plow on our robot to have the porticulus slide on. It was made out of 1"×1" with 1/8" wall square aluminum and that still bent and minimum speed. It wasn’t major bending but that part of the arm bent roughly 1.5" back by the end of State.