Shooter demo optimization

FIRST General Forum
1

From many teams’ experiences in 2012, you will find that your 2016 robot with a high goal shooter is a great demo robot for the off season. However, bringing a castle with you to a demo is not easy. When making design choices, you may want to consider also the ability of your robot to shoot boulders into a standard gym basketball hoop. From my experience, a wheeled shooter with the wheels on the bottom of the ball to put on a back spin is most effective, but I’ve not tried anything with the 2016 game piece. The back spin allows for a lot of error in the vertical location where the ball hits the backboard, because the ball is kicked nearly straight down.

Robots playing basketball (even if that is not the ‘game’) is a very effective demo.

2

The best demo prop (at least for sponsors) is a blue banner. I know where you’re coming from, but making design choices based on what will make a good off season demo robot seems like it would lower the level of competitiveness of a team. Like everythong else, it’s completely up to you and your team if you want to go that way!

On the other hand, I think the robots this year will make a great demo bot regardless of intent.