I uploaded 18 videos from both our competitions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=, we had one match where we slammed in so hard in auto ,it knocked our intake off , got a foul for out of volume, still won.
The Gear Auto is 50 cents worth of parts and deadly in qualifications and eliminations, assuming your robot drives straight in auto. Ours was the best middle- gear auto at Ventura when it worked , actually failed in playoff (due to our robot veerring) … when working and robot drives straight… its instant on. It simply is a small metal wedge hook in center that thin rod that interfaces with the minor ledge inside the Gear (says within max vol…gear can go outside max vol). Our scuba tube intake I believe helps pop the gear on as well as simple momentum (BTW that intake was the fastest at both competitions, couple secs to fill 40+ seconds to empty with those rollers) . We finished in Ventura 8-5 including playoffs. Oh well always next year…
In the meantime feel free to copy this or any of our ideas, we are out until next year…we’ll be back at it raring to go in 2018 with another “effective bot” :). we actually will have a real computing/cad class at the HS finally, so that’s cool. I’d love to see a team without gear auto use our simple design in future weeks to rise to the top in rank. We would have figured out a side gear auto, and gear holder that opens instead of passive HP wait (already built it in Ventura hoping this would be our year to go) …this front gear auto is NOT using our primary gear holder (which is on the side opposite the winch) . This simple gear hook is just for first 15 seconds. Its beautiful in its ultimate simplicity and effectiveness.
My son who was drive coach adult in Ventura , and I were talking about all of our robot designs on our way home, last THREE seasons we went far in events NOT using our primary design idea we built as a team… Two years ago we designed to be a 5 stacker topper, turned into a topper and dual can grabber (via cheesecake) . Last year we wanted to be the HG shooter…tuned into a top breacher that could scale and best LG shooter(at our competitions) or simply feed to others. This season we wanted to be a top HE Fuel bot with auto and climb 1-2 gear , turned into a 5-6max gear runner with gear auto and climb…we need to stop that we waste so much time on primary stuff we end up changing from. Think we’ll spend more time on designing or primary scoring , before making final decisions next year.
We had an absolute blast this year and saw many of our favorite existing teams we like to partner with, two awesome venues and also made many new friends. That’s a winning season in our book. I’ll see some of you in OC week 5 up close. Still “robot season” for me.
**75-10****Special thank you’s to teams 2102 (lending us the strap and idea) 399 (choosing us) , 580 (for playing your tails off to help us secure #3 by 1 point) and team 702 (for open sourcing vision and tips on Mecanum)…as well as all our other elimination alliance partners 8, 3882 and 968! **
