This is what I like to see.
Well laid out, simple without many custom parts. Its clearly strong and probably pretty light considering the use of tough boxes, KOP wheels, ABS and belts.
When I go to FRC competitions I love to look at robots like this; robots that were built smart without a lot of silly features and shiny custom parts. Just how great of an advantage are two speed shifters over single speed? When was the last time 71 had two speed transmissions? Or FRC 25? Think on that…
I guarantee you that if the greatest teams in FIRST all built robots like this THEY WOULD DO EQUALLY AS WELL IF NOT BETTER. You can save ridiculous amounts of time building your robot if you just make it simple. There are so many off the shelf robot parts nowadays that you really don’t need to make transmissions, wheels, or even a drive train if you’re really pushing it.
Oh but your sponsors make all those parts for you! You don’t pay anything for their work so why not go crazy! Idk about other teams but I feel bad about making machine shops make parts for us instead of their paying customers. The shop that works for us loses several hundred dollars each time they work on our stuff.
But custom parts are more pretty!
Wrong. Practicing, programming, testing, and winning competitions is more pretty.
Pretty much my design creed.
Please do not mock the 2 speed transmission like it never has a purpose. You should not be so quick to negatively view something as a silly feature or useless. Just because teams have custom parts does not mean sponsors always made them. Our team machines a lot of the parts for the robot, sponsors supply us the metal to do it. But I agree trying to keep it simple as possible is a good design plan.
If you mind my asking, how much does your Digital Side Car ribbon cable weigh?
Thanks for the post Martin, this is by far our best chassis IMO, and that cable weighs under .5 lb
Sorry if I came across as mocking, maybe I showed have toned down my argument.
I understand that making lots of custom parts in-house can teach students a lot about working with tools, which I am super down with.
But I’m going to be insistent in saying that things like custom trannies and wheels offer only a very marginal advantage in the game, IMO.
I’ve tried many things in my years of building robots and this is what I have learned.
Home - View All - AndyMark, Inc this is our cable for the side car.
Please tell me that is a dropped-center 6wd, just with the middle two wheels missing…
Yes it is. We are waiting for the wheels to come in. The blizzard kinda put us in a bad spot.
misread the post…