This is a follow-up to a poll I made near the beginning of build season. You can find that poll here
I’m curious how several weeks of prototyping and developing strategies have affected the results of this poll. Building a decent shooter, climber, and gear mechanism is a hard enough challenge for many teams, but trying to improve these mechanisms any further can quickly become a problem.
In a game that has relatively restrictive volume constraints, trying to make a “perfect” mechanism for all of these challenges is extremely difficult. I’m wondering who is deciding to specialize in a few aspects of this game and who still wants to attempt all three.
Things have actually turned out pretty well for my team. We ended up having to hack together an agitator/feeder mechanism more quickly than I would have liked because we forgot about it, but other than that we’ve seen modest success in all areas.
Iron Kings are playing all three parts of the game, which is normally not what I’d cosign but we felt we could package them all with minimal downside if something didn’t pan out.
Fuel has been the bulk of our time investment, and it’s paying off nicely. We spent much of Saturday eliminating choke point after choke point, and final assembly on the competition robot will let us address those issues even better (since we won’t have to disassemble anything first). I do expect we’ll use a chunk of unbag time next week to tune on this even more.
Climb is about a week behind where I really want it to be, but we’ve gotten a robot off the ground*.
Gear is the spot we’ve punted on for now; we’ve got something basic, but we expect to keep iterating on this with the practice robot after the deadline. Might happen for Tippecanoe (week 1), surely will happen by Perry Meridian (week 4).
You’re never as far along as you’d like to be, but considering this team’s past performances and how many rookies (kids and adults alike) we have on the team I’m very pleased with where we are. This one ought to be a showstopper once it’s done.
Fun fact, this is the first time any of my teams have gotten this far on any year’s climbing task. Didn’t happen in 2004, 2010, 2013*, or 2016.
**No, 2815 didn’t achieve even a lousy 10-point hang. That was kind of a lost year for the team.
Skipping fuel altogether. The climber is working perfectly, except for a bit of code that will smoke a CIM when we’re NOT climbing. The rope auto-centers after we grab it, and we zips right up in about two seconds. Active gear hanger should be usable tonight. Gear floor pickup will be post-bag, but we left enough room for it in the design.
I’m decently confident that all of the mechanisms will work in the next 48 hours, but I voted for the second option to be conservative.
Didn’t expect us to “do everything” this year, but sometimes your design gets away from you and you build a wall of hooks belts that solves everything.
Our main two goals this years was to gears and climbing very well.We have a shooter/ feeder system almost complete but needs some testing once complete on the robot.Hoping to have it done and tweaked during our district events but will be working at disctrict championship if we qualify this year
I was a big advocate of having our robot be good all-around this year, but we ended up focusing on doing gears and climbing very well rather than being sorta good at everything. Our robot ended up climbing really consistently and delivering gears very well, better than we would have done had we done all three.
This situation is pretty common tbh
It’s generally better to be good at one or two things than to be meh at all of them. This rule has guided my team, as well as many of our friend-teams, for the past few years.
We’ve had our two big priorities done for weeks now. Been working on the third but we never got it to a place we consider good enough to put on the robot, so we’re just sticking to the two.
Design strategy is not one-size-fits-all. Teams must know their limits and work within them. The strategies I recommended to 2791 (gears, climb, and fuel) and 1257 (just gears and climb) were different because the teams have different resources.
I strongly agree with this approach, though as a fellow 1257 alum, I may be a bit biased.
Last year we tried to do it all - full breach, high goals, scale - and ended up with many half-working mechanisms and somewhat shaky performance in all aspects. This year we came into the season with the mindset that we would select a more modest design and focus on iterating upon a smaller subset of scoring methods. I think this approach has really worked out well, and I can say (before competing) that going for only two of the three scoring methods was the correct choice for us.
For the powerhouse teams that know they can perform well in all aspects, it definitely makes sense to do so. But I think for a lot of mid-level teams being a “master of one” is better than being a “jack of all trades, master of none”.
For us, week-0 events (we did one on Saturday and another on Sunday) were incredibly valuable. We showed that we could deliver gears and shoot fuel, and found the areas we need improvement. Gears were a passive mechanism, but tonight an active one will be going on to replace that. We’ll also be adding a secondary agitator to the robot tonight. Our shooter encoder wasn’t working as well as we wanted, so we swapped that out last night for one with higher counts. All in all, these changes should solve all of our issues with those areas of the game, and we have another 4 weeks to test and improve them on our practice bot if need be.
We’ve also started developing a climber, with the plan to bring it in as our withholding. Our robot easily has 30 lbs to spare right now, and 4 weeks with our practice bot should let us develop a good, fast climber!
Our robot focuses on fast gear cycling and climbing. We believe that these are the two most efficient ways of scoring given our team’s technical capabilities. We explored the option of mounting a shooter but that would require a major reconfiguration of our gearing mechanism. However, it remains to be seen in the future
