I was looking at the field today, especially at the hanging tetras.
I’ll tell you now, if you didn’t figure it out already (and by looking at the topics thus far, it doesn’t look like anyone has)…
Putting a tetra on top will make it drop.
Giving it any reasonable amount of force on the side will make it drop.
A good whack to the goal about midways (like me hitting it with the palm of my hand with a bit of a grunt) will make it drop. (Note that you don’t want to break the field, lest the thing that drops becomes your ranking.)
And one other thing about the tetras that may or may not be addressed soon…holding some of them, a loose nut in one piece of the pipe will cause that part to spin around. Know that if you’re planning on building a one-pole grabber.
what does that have to do with the nut? are these pvc pipes, or poles?
another thing to note, though might have been said, is that you can’t just through them on top, you have to place them as shown in the clips.
I suspect that if you just carelessly put them on top, they might not align easily.
i hope that made sense, it’s real early right now, i’m going to prepare our bot for the israeli kickoff (which will be really boring cause i watched the whole thing yesterday :))
Try and put a tetra on a goal not-aligned, or carelessly… it’s hard to balance it that way, and it takes just the slightest movement to knock it into place… it’ll slide into seated position… this is a good thing.
They’re PVC pipes, yes. But the tetra-maker plates are held in place by nuts and bolts. They come loose, and the pipe it is attached to rotates.
Of course, you can retighten it (I fixed one with my fingers), but when you’ve got 80 of the darn things around the field, that may get a bit unwieldly.
I don’t know about giving it a side whack would take it down. They are using some pretty heavy magnets (50 pounders to be exact). That’ll be a little bit of force to take down. Nothing that should be too hard however.
On the actual field pieces, the end caps will be glued to the pipe, so it will not rotate. And the bolts should be installed with loctite, so there should be very little chance of them coming apart during a competition.
Mike - I don’t recall seeing a 50 lb magnet - I think they hang from something like a 3 lb magnet - it looked to me like the magnet described in the non-encrypted field pieces and parts list released on Thursday. I thought they were called pot magnets or something like that - anyways, I don’t think they are 50 lb magnets, but - maybe I missed that.
Well…the tetras would in no way be able to be held up by 3 lb magnets as they are 8.5 pounds each. I was talking to one of the builders of the field in Kokomo. I asked how the hanging tetras were attached. He said there are 3 washers on the tetras and a 50 lb magnet on the goal.
I have looked everywhere and can’t find out how many points you recieve for knocking off a hanging tetra or for capping with a vision tetra. Does anyone know???
If you put a vision tetra on a goal, it counts as a normal tetra–three points. (And then there’s the whole bonus tetra thing–check the manual for that.)
If you knock off a hanging tetra, you get nothing for that–but dropping the tetra into the area under the goal is one point.
The Hanging tetras are worth one point if they just fall and land inside the bottom of the support struts. If you cap with tetra it is worth 3 points and can be used in a tic tac toe if it is the top most tetra. I think that everyone should go for knowcking down the tatras seeing as all you have to do is smack and walk away!
Yea, the only thing the hanging tetras are good for is to get an extra tetra during autonomous, because after autonomous they go away.
It’s not clear in the diagram (or it wasn’t for me anyway), but capping the vision tetra puts bonus tetras on your OPPONENTS goals, not on the ones close to you. This makes them better.
I’m pretty sure the bonus is for your OWN corner goals, because I would not see any strategical advantage in letting your opponent start off with anywhere from 6-9 points over you.
And i’m sorry if i get off topic slightly, but, - if you put BOTH vision tetras on any of the center goals during autonomous, would you get TWO extra tetras on the corners? or still only one?