Very important announcement to all of my friends who are using the 2024 kitbot. Using Neo motors for the shooter, you can score from the trap from the floor.
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What kind of trap? The team version made out of plywood behaves quite differently from the official version made out of polycarb, with proper limits on the door…
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Do you have access to a polycarb trap? If so, have you done any tests on shooting into it?
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Do you have a video?
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Do some searching, there has been a fair amount of discussion on here about it. Teams that have great success shooting into the plywood trap find that the polycarb trap doesn’t work at all for them. They are two very different reactions.
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We’ve got the field set up this weekend. I’ll see if I can’t convince one of the teams to shoot at the trap tomorrow to see what’s up. Our setup is extremely close to the real field.
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Yup. Team excitement and despair.
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What I learned is I need to build the trap chutes. The shot looks like it works from the front.
But from the back, the bottom of the trap door is opening much farther than the actual field allows. Maybe twice as far. As much effort as we put into the stage, it’s still not good enough.
We’ll try again next weekend.
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We will be happy to take a couple shots at it this weekend. Excited to get on the field! Thanks for working on getting it close to the real thing.
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I can tell you from first hand experience that there is a huge difference between the home-built wood trap door and polycarb and even more difference between old/used polycarb and new. We have done fairly extensive testing over the past few weeks, shooting hundreds of Notes into the trap from the floor.
With the wood door, we were shooting almost 100%.
Then we switched to a polycarb door. This piece of poly was one that was laying around in a pile of old stuff. The size was right, so we cut it and put it in place of the wood door. We still had good success, probably making 85% of the shots in.
Then we got the official AndyMark version of the trap door. We went from making almost all of the shots to about 0%. It’s all about the surface. New poly is very “sticky”. A Note will not slide on new polycarb. It will come to a dead stop and just bounce off, no matter the angle or speed of the shot. The good news is that this behavior does start to diminish as more shots are taken at the trap.
There are other issues with shooting into the trap as well, but be aware that there is a big difference between the wooden trap door and a polycarb one, especially new poly.
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I wonder if they will pre-wear the trap doors at competition then because if its that huge of a difference FIRST should probably be trying to make the field as consistent as possible at each event.
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Wishful thinking right there.
I highly doubt there will be any standardization of trap doors. Teams are supposed to build robots robust to field tolerances after all.
I will stick to my golden rule of “never build a robot around a loophole”.
Will they replace the trap doors for champs? Will Einstein be fresh? All good questions.
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that’s a fair point, but it also seems like it can affect more conventional trap mechanisms, especially considering most teams are using the wooden field in their prototyping it would probably be for the best if they pre wear it, additionally they would basically be hoping that every team at competition sees this chief delphi post and is informed, idk it feels like to me that a lot of teams wont even know about it and get surprised how different it is at competition, but as you said that’s probably
but I can still hope!
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I highly doubt FIRST will do anything like that. I think as the season (and even matches within an event) goes on, the trap doors will get slipperier and behave more like our initial testing in that the Note will be able to slide across the surface of the door.
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Is there anything stopping drive team from rubbing the trap door during pre-match?
G103 as rubbing it enough to change it’s physical properties probably constitutes “damaging”.
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Although you probably could rub it to check whether it feels sticky so you can decide whether you try to shoot. Although getting good enough at judging that would probably be difficult.
If you rub the trap, the ghost of Woodie Flowers will emerge and grant you 3 wishes.
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