The Lessons From Week 0

FIRST General Forum
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So, by now, most Week 0 events are wrapping up. Robots have been broken, defenses have been breached, and towers have been scaled. What has everyone learned? From participating, viewing, or simply talking about the event. Here are some of my notable facts.

  1. Very few to no robots can damage Category C defenses by themselves.

  2. Very very few robots can scale. (501 managed it in qual 16 in merrimack)

  3. Most shooters at this point are not quite tuned, and struggle to shoot any high goals at all.

What have you all learned?

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Driver ability is huge. A lot of the robots look capable, so the difference is in drive skill. A small slip up is going to cost a team a lot of time.

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2 threads now:stuck_out_tongue:

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I learned high goals will be a lot more rare then expected and that defense is very important. Visibility is as bad as I imagined so make sure you have a camera on the robot. I also learned ball inconsistency is back so make sure to have a way to adjust your shooter to compensate. Tortugas were not as rampant as originally thought so that’s good.

Other then that I learned this is going to be a really fun game.

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I heard that the wheeled robots (no matter the type) were having a lot of trouble with the slick surface of the actual field components. Any observations on the success of pneumatic wheels vs. treads?

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About defenses: most teams can do most terrain-based defenses, as well as the low bar. The category A’s seemed to be more of a challenge, as very few people attempted either the portcullis or the cheval de friese. The drawbridge/sally port I did not see anyone attempt at Suffield, though, to be fair (did 181 do the drawbridge? I’m not sure), I wasn’t exactly sitting in the stands and watching the whole time.

Shooting: Ooh, big one. High goals are hard. Really hard. I think we learned that it may be beneficial to shoot low instead of high, simply for the higher success rate (substantially), and less time wasted on aiming/defenders blocking your way. I think low goals are the way to go, especially if you’re going for a capture.

Thanks to Aces High for hosting Suffield Shakedown!

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Spies are underutilized.

And that will probably change sometime around Friday afternoon of Palmetto.

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Does anyone have a video of 501 scaling at merrimack? Im very interested to see this and i cant find it anywhere. Thanks!

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Jump to 1:09 (1 hour, 9 mins) in the clip, and watch the left tower. They started a bit early, but I guess they just wanted the practice, to make sure their mechanism worked.

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Thank you very much!

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It’s always a pleasure to make FRC students happy, excited & hopeful of the future.

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i think that will change Friday morning. These were just practice, that will be a true competition.

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The individual matches have been uploaded to the FRC GameSense Youtube channel.

I just would like to take this time to highlight Frank Merrick in the bottom right corner of this video, celebrating 501’s successful climb. After being near him through a pair of competitions, I’ve begun to see how much he truly wants every team to succeed. He’s great for FRC.

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