Week 0 observations

[codedr]

(1) Turn off any debug printf’s, println’s etc before competition. They really stop your robot dead.
(2) Make sure to image your roborio (and your backup roborio) with your correct team number. Saves a lot time and angst.
(3) If you are creating a socket or some other software object and it fails multiple times in a row (5, 10, 100), you should probably stop doing that.
(4) Add ‘Turn off WiFi on DS’ to your going to the field checklist.
(5) If you have a backup radio, image it for the competition after the line becomes short.

Unverified: Looked like robot software was crashing and restarting (java) but didn’t see it in the log.

It looks like it will be difficult for a single robot to place hatches and cargo on the rocket. An efficient alliance has one or two robots placing hatch covers and another (or two) storing cargo.

[MrForbes]

It looks like it will be difficult for a single robot to place hatches and cargo on the rocket. An efficient alliance has one or two robots placing hatch covers and another (or two) storing cargo.

It looks like it’s not easy to design a robot that does both well, so we probably will see lots of specialization on alliances. There will be exceptions, of course. We think ours is decent at both, but it required a week 5 redesign that put the two parts of the game on opposite ends of the robot, to make it happen. At the Week 0 we attended, I believe we had the only robot that was scoring both game pieces. And we spent most of yesterday remaking both of our manipulators, to make them faster.