Vector’s Kickoff Recap
Whoo boy. This game’s a doozy. Where to even start? Vector met today along with the other two FRC teams in our district, T3 and TSA All Stars for a combined kickoff. We spent about three hours combing through the manual and brainstorming before all going home, and I’m pretty happy with the day overall.
Initial Game Impressions
While every individual aspect may not be difficult, making a competent robot that can score in every possible way seems very difficult. Vector will do a strategy deep dive with the full team in the next few days to determine optimal scoring strategies. This game is a mix between 2013 shooters and 2017 intakes, pretty interesting.
Priority List
After thoroughly going through the rulebook, Vector compiled a list of Must-do, Should-do, and Could-do items to prepare for archetype brainstorming. This list is our first time doing a proper priority list, but already it’s proved very useful.
Strategy
Before even thinking about mechanisms or robot design styles, a few teams broke off and specifically discussed alliance strategy for optimal points. This is assuming ideal circumstances where each cycle takes the same amount of time and does not cover Auto or Endgame.
This doesn’t even touch on the endgame, which is a whole different ball park with the trap. I’ll have to see how difficult that is once Vector builds their own field elements.
I’ll be doing a deep dive on scoring combos with Vector sometime within the next few days, but there’s plenty of tools available for teams to do their own, such as this score calculator from @DAflamingFOX,
This strat spreadsheet from the Washed Cadathon members(@howlongismyname , @Nick.kremer , and @AndrewCard ) adapted to Crescendo(unfilled) here, and this strat spreadsheet from @Richstar123 . I’m sure there’s many more, but these are three that I’ve seen that are very well done.
General Brainstorming
A link to the most legible whiteboard brainstorming can be found here.
I’ll try to summarize as best as I can
Summary
- Must/Should/Could list
- shown above
- Ways to score
- Safe Zones
- Stage Zone, Source Area
- Point values for various endgame situations
- Expansion and frame perimeter rules
- 120” frame circumference with a height of 48” starting zone
- Maximum of 12” expansion in multiple directions, no height expansion
- Misc sketches of ideas
- Cycle calculations
- Shown above
Notable Mechanism Concepts
We had a few out of the box concepts that I think are fun to look at and take inspiration from, viable or not
- Hungry Hungry Hippos(pronounced “HHH”)
- 12” extension, arm or linear actuator
- Auto only
- Grab Center Notes first
- “The Foot” ©
- Kick the Note
- We realized the note slides really well on carpet, so the natural inclination was to kick it
- Having a fast, no intake required Note mover could be helpful for shuffling notes to teammates quickly
KrayonCAD
Talking about whiteboard designs leads perfectly into the next step in the brainstorming process, cad archetype brainstorming!
But first, a shill. KrayonCAD is a system that allows robot concepts to be created in Onshape within minutes thanks to fully customizable subsystems. More information can be found here.
Anyways, back to Vector. All of the KrayonCAD brainstorming so far can be found here. I don’t need to go through all of them, but I’ll point out a few promising archetypes.
The Virtual Four-Bar linkage of Krayon 6 looks like it could be a very compact, easy way of intaking notes off the ground and transferring them into a shooter area.
The elevator found in Krayon 6 and Krayon 1 serves dual function as a climber and as an Amp mechanism. I always love a good mechanism mashup.
Also from Krayon 1, an under the bumper intake is a very compact intake strategy that completely eliminates the possibility for intake damage during collisions. It does, however, limit the width of your intake.
A pivoting shooter like the one found in Krayon 8 could allow shooting directly into the Amp as well as shooting up into the Speaker.
Overall Takeaways from Day 1(That I haven’t mentioned already)
- Drive coaching is going to be very complicated. There’s a lot of moving elements to consider
- 3 piece auto(preload + 2 mid field pieces) is 100% viable
- A short robot is a winning robot
- Cranberry Alarm has some really good prototypes already, definitely worth paying a lot of attention to in the next few days
- Notes are very easy to work with. They squish, they flex, they twist. It seems like any wheel will grab them in any orientation
- A lot of teams will attempt the trap, it remains to be seen how many teams will succeed
- Wow this is really similar to 2017
- Wow this is really similar to 2013
Future Posts
- Various shooter prototypes
- Various intake prototypes
- Lots of game piece testing
- Lots of field interaction testing
- Maybe a strategy post?
- Design and game analysis posts
I know our cone drop tests were very popular last year, hopefully we can produce similarly useful data early on this year as well. Oh Yeah!