In the 2023 season, can you tell us about the mistakes (strategic, design, etc.) you wish you hadn’t made?
I wished I hadn’t designed our intake so that popped cubes lol (but it still won us an award so that;s fun)
7 Likes
We made an intake on the end of the arm that switched between cube and cone mode by telescoping the rollers apart or together. Way too heavy (15 lbs). Also we had some knowledge gap relating to REV libraries that affected our swerve steering control.
3 Likes
It was a great pleasure to watch you at Archimedes Division 
(maybe it would be more beautiful if our robot did not have problems over and over again :d)
Our intake system is probably around 15-20 lbs and yes, one of my biggest regrets was making the intake so heavy.
Oh boy, where to begin?
17 Likes
We should have ignored grabbing cones from the ground. Even when we had the functionality built, it wasn’t strategically advantageous for us.
It would have been nice to put more effort into lowering our CG. Our robot was super light and had a somewhat high CG, so there was easy solutions, we just didn’t have the bandwidth to execute on them (we’re still looking for mentors!)
Should have used 1/8" wall tube on our drive from the beginning.
Ideally find a way to not be eliminated from playoffs at both of our events because of wires coming out of our PDH and Spark MAX.
Do more practice at home before going to the fields at NASA and SJHS and find our crippling issues before we waste field time.
17 Likes
Trying to do 4 regional events and champs.
Talking with Team 1622 at our Week 1 event who signed up all 6 weeks…
We should have done at least 5 regionals. 
19 Likes
4 regional events + championship must be crazy.
(Last season we participated and won 1 regional competition and went to the championship 
)
3 Likes
Robonauts:
2 Likes
Tough question. From our too long list I’ll pick - didn’t use metal fasteners to hold the battery strap (as posted in another CD thread - the battery tried to leave the robot taking CAN wiring and a swerve module with it).
1 Like
In Archimedes Division qualifying match 113, our bottom plate holding the battery and compressor exploded after a hard collision. (Our driver realized this and went straight to the charging station) in the last 70 seconds of the match we couldn’t do anything but balance 
1 Like
We didn’t invest enough time in prototyping.
We didn’t invest in swerve.
We ignored Citrus Circuit Golden Rule # 2 (“rolly grabber” intakes!)
13 Likes
I wish we would’ve gone with an Aluminum base instead of our Acrylic Hockey Glass base at the first competition. We had the old material lying around and it machined nicely, but didn’t withstand full contact hits this year.
1 Like
Prototyping is really important but don’t stay in a prototype for 1 month like us 
6 Likes
We decided to make 2 robots, a “alpha” bot in hopes it would qualify us for champs at our first regional and a “final” bot as a refined, optimized bot for the rest of the season. Safe to say, it didn’t turn out as expected 
2 Likes
we had too many spots on our robot where we just hand drilled holes rather than using a cnc (which we have) or at least a drill press, we also probably should’ve made our hex shafts have more support because they were bent (this didn’t end up hurting functionality too much but i’m sure it didn’t help) we also did swerve for the first time during build season, which i don’t regret but it was probably a mistake
2 Likes
Last season we built 2 robots, but the first robot we built was built in 4-5 days and we only used it to understand the game in general. Then we switched to the main system (we made a lot of changes such as switching from tank drive chassis to swerve chassis in the last 2 weeks before the Regional)
I hate hand-drilled holes. We never drill holes in the part unless we have to 
we resolved to machine basically everything this upcoming build season