After Friday’s matches at Los Angeles and seeing 1717 perform well, we decided to add a hood. We’ve had nothing but success since, transforming our ranged shooter into a turreted dumper. Everything is manually controlled now (3 weeks of camera tracking no longer implemented).
Thanks to teams 39 and 1165 for going all the way through the finals for the win with us, and congratulations to 2102, 1828, and 991 on a very close final match! Arizona was a blast, we’ll finally get to see everyone in Atlanta since our rookie year!
(And congrats to 2486 on the Regional Chairman’s Award! You guys have done so much in just 2 years!)
To be honest I really thought that the ability to shoot down was an obvious design feature that should’ve been on all shooters from the get-go. Sean from 1771 and I had talked about it early in the season and it clearly paid off for them.
I still want to see 1726 and 1771 side by side one day. Scary thought. Oh wait, that’s what next to them? 188??? :yikes:
1323 has been designing a new turret and hood since 1771’s performance.
I guess you guys just are ahead of the game, it took us a while to figure it out…you sure were right! Other robots at AZ with upward pointing shooters did not score nearly as well as we did.
This robot was amazing to watch in the regional. I had doubts about turrets and shooters starting off this year, but watching this robot left me cheering it on (through my TV)
Based on the video I’ve seen, the camera tracking and long shots make for a much more beautiful, impressive machine than the more efficient solution of turreted dumping. Mind you, when you’re holding a championship trophy, the robot’s going to look pretty beautiful regardless of what had to be done to it to get you there!
I would really, really, like to see this game played on a playing field with about twice as much floor area so that teams with elegant designs get a chance to show off what they can do other than just “push and shove” and dump in close.
Mind you, I say that for all the games… when we increased the teams on the floor back in '05, we really should have increased the size of the floor as well.
The camera tracking and making long shots looks great when it works, but we tried to get the camera adjusted in LA and the lighting was just a bit too challenging, so we went with manual control, at short range, with the downward pointing shooter. We didn’t quite get the hang of it in LA and lost in the semis, but in Phoenix we started out with it shooting down and it worked great, we lost only one match. Mind you, there was a bit more competition in LA, with several “power dumpers” able to score big globs of balls in no time flat…none of the AZ teams had robots quite like 973/399/1388/207!
If you can use the camera reliably, that would be really nice to see
We got ours at the local WalMart for about four dollars per roll. Rather than compressing the balls to push them up the helix, the central roller slaps them really fast (1200 rpm), meaning there is very little load on the motor driving it.
We had a jamming hopper in 2006, which is one reason why we have a helix this year…a single ball path helps to prevent jamming.
If your robot design allows it, see if you can make a narrow path that the balls follow. I didn’t get any pictures of your robot after you added the metal sheeting on it, but the one with the netting makes it look like the ball path is not much wider than one ball, but it doesn’t really have anything at the top to keep the balls all in one line, they can bunch up next to each other.
