We HAVE to build a shooter off-season!

FIRST General Forum
#1

mmm…noyoudon’t

The past two years we had pick and place games.

Some would say three and I disagree

Steamworks was a launching game that never got used due to the point mismatch.
There was a high goal for experienced teams
And a low goal for newer teams
100+ balls on the field to launch
Most matches everyone opted for the peg because it was easier for the points
I highly doubt a bunch of boxes driving from one peg to the next is what the GDC had in mind

In 2012-2014 we had launching games 3 in a row and there’s no reason it can’t happen again with pick and place.

The reason I bring this up is that this past month I’ve seen a decent amount of buzz on shooter practice for next year.
You ever play cards and stack your hand because you know statistically what should come up next when the deck gets cut? You remember that feeling when it doesn’t come up and that amazing hand you built is now worth bumpkins?

This is not at all meant to dissuade you from building a shooter especially if you never tried. Our team might (see below) because none of the students have done it yet. Just don’t let next years “it has to be a launching game” be the driving factor. Even if it is a launching game, it could be something odd that has nothing to do with what you built anyway.

Focus on something you know you need.
For us this fall it will likely be vision for the programmers
and
Floor scoops for different shapes for mechanical (if we have time, we’ll toss a shooter in there)

2 Likes
#2

This right here is enough reason to build one in the off-season. If next year ends up being pick and place, that means you’ll have students graduating that never built a shooter.

A number of years back, based on existing student experience, we essentially designed and built prototypes for a hypothetical ball game - using nerf footballs. The tails on those things were a huge pain to deal with, but the shooter ended up being quite fascinating and I think the whole process taught them a lot about adapting to odd situations, regardless of the actual game pieces.

7 Likes
#3

I do like the idea of trying to launch an odd shape like a football (accurately).
I get what you mean about building the shooter cuz we haven’t before, But that’s why I threw the other two items in there.

We’ve never done vision anything which can be applied every year.
Other than the boxes from powerup, they haven’t built a ground pickup, especially for multiple pickups at a time. We’ve relied on the player station or the hoppers in steamworks.

Looking back at shortcoming for our team in recent years, driver alignment and game piece collecting are weak points for us.

#4

Build something, but it doesn’t totally matter what. You don’t have to figure out best practices for each type of mechanism in the off-season, but you do have to figure out how to quickly and effectively perfect a new design concept in prototyping. The skills needed to do that are universal, and perhaps the most important mechanical skill in FRC.

4 Likes
#5

I’m waiting for another “pick and place” game that lets you hold more than one game object at a time. :sunglasses:

2 Likes
#6

This year was a shooting game if you tried hard enough :slight_smile:

5686 had this:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BuDLpdxFEsj/media/?size=l

3 Likes
#7

During kickoff/before reading the rules I was really hoping we could have placed both of this year’s objects at the same time. The cargo ship looked ripe for double game-piece-placement.

#8

There’s a video floating around on social media of someone’s Stronghold robot which successfully shot a cargo into the cargo ship, followed by a flipping hatch which landed on the Velcro, all in one smooth shot.

Anyway, what I like about a (simple) shooter is that it’s fairly easy to prototype and fabricate (one spinning wheel will do the trick) and allows your software team to practice useful techniques like PID and velocity setpoint control. We started to prototype a shooter in 2018 but had to shelve it when the Power Up season started. It would be fun to go back and finish.

2 Likes
#9

I was with you until this part. Vision is very nice to have, but is very rarely “needed”. Even 2016 which had relatively small goal size was able to be dealt with using tight drivetrain control and a flashlight. Vision was better than a flashlight, but definitely not needed.

#10

But it can be a very powerful tool in almost any game. If you can use vision to align with a target to facilitate faster scoring or to navigate in auto, it can really improve your effectiveness.

I consider vision to be a really good tool to add to your toolbox and the offseason seems like a great time to do it since you already have a robot to add it to.

1 Like
#11

Absolutely! I just think that if the goal is focus on something you know you will need, then perfecting a scoring mechanism, investigating motion control, or experimenting with drivetrain changes might be a better approach.

#12

And we know vision is something that we need.
And ground pickup is something that we need.

We looked at what was hurting for us in past years, and these are the two items we’re looking at.

Do what you need. The main argument of the topic is do what will benefit your team overall, not focus on what you think the game will be. When it comes down to it, it’s only one year.

2 Likes
#13

I guess we are just talking semantics here. Maybe you need vision to accomplish a goal that your team has.

#14

We have 60 kids who know how to make a pick-and-place robot and 0 who know how to make a simple hooded shooter. It’s a completely safe bet to design one because the worst case scenario is that some students learn stuff. We designed a cascading elevator before the 2017 season, but had to wait until 2018 to apply what we learned. Not a problem at all.

#15

I don’t really want to start a new thread for this so I figured I’d just ask it here as it’s mostly related.

What are peoples opinions on spending the off season improving your existing robot to be better at the current game? Unless you happened to win worlds, (and even then,) I’m sure there are some things on your robot you think could be improved. Do folks put a lot of value in continuing to iterate or copy proven designs during the off season? (As opposed to picking completely new and unrelated design projects to work on.)

#16

My team is probably going to make a new robot based on what we believe the best avenue for our team should have been. It will draw ideas from multiple robots and be a different style (I haven’t seen any robots similar to what we want to do). We will also use our current competition robot to have the underclassman continue to iterate and learn from it.

#17

This year we used a very similar ball intake as 2016 because we knew it worked and was good and during the prototyping phase we had a small team with a list of teams and years researching what kind of mechanisms they used to do similar tasks

#18

I would argue that for a majority of teams, 2017 was a pick and place only game, giving us already 3 pick and place games in a row. I think FIRST would see this similarly. I don’t know if this is still true, but at one time one of the known objectives of the game design committee was to give students unique challenges during all four years of their high school FRC career. What that means is anyone’s guess, but as I like to say, robots are expensive but CAD is free. If you’re unsure what to practice in the off-season, practice designing everything.

1 Like
#19

Generally speaking, I think that off-season should be spent filling some weakness or gap in your knowledge. If there’s things you could learn by improving your 2019 robot then go for it. We designed a small switch+exchange robot off-season last year and learned a lot from it. If there isn’t something specific you’re going to learn by improving your Deep Space robot then don’t bother. Identify something you struggle with as a team and then figure out what off-season project will help you fill that need.

It’s easy to get caught up in the previous year’s game, but as far as I’m concerned the season is over when Detroit champs ends.

#20

I think you will learn something useful either way. The biggest benefit of iterating on the current design is that you generally can compare your new iterations to your previous iterations as well as to the performance that you have seen from other teams. This gives you a concrete benchmark to judge your design iterations against.

Another advantage of iterating the current game design is that many of the fundamental design elements can be re-used from game to game. Our elevator this year was an iteration off of our elevator last year. Some elements were very similar between the two designs, but many aspects were different and were based on things that we had seen on other designs in 2018 or areas that we had improved on our design in the post season.

Generally, we have some ideas for things that we wanted to do during the season, but never had the time to work on or to finish. Those can be great projects to work on in the offseason. It gives the students a concrete project to work on with tangible results. But it can also be a way for students to validate their ideas that maybe they thought were a little too risky. This will build their confidence and might allow them to be more bold to try out-of-the-box ideas next year.

We have also participated in completely new challenges such as the CAD-a-thon competitions. This gives us a chance to develop our CAD skills as well as to practice our design development process.

In general, I would say that you really can’t go wrong either way. The students are going to learn valuable things by doing either type of activity in the offseason.