We're Gonna Need a Bigger Vacuum

[Ryan_Swanson]

If you’ve prototyped with the Notes for any appreciable amount of time you’ve found that they’re really easy to damage. Run your intake a second too long while the Note is jammed and poof… orange zest. Have a bolt sticking out where it shouldn’t be? Bam, giant gouge in your Note.

These are pretty normal things to have happen in the course of prototyping and iterating. These failures are made so much more painful by the fact that Notes are a preciously rare commodity. Many teams don’t have more than 1-3 to play with, and if they ruin them, there’s no great way to repair them in a way that they still function like a new Note.

Some teams have been prototyping for a while and have learned these lessons the hard way. Others are just spinning up their first few prototypes… and if I had to bet the teams spinning up their first prototypes now are also teams that have access to far fewer Notes. Here are some high level tips for limiting damage on your Notes:

Prototyping Tips

• Have a quick trigger finger - if using a drill or controller to drive a prototype, be prepared to stop movement at the first sign of a jam
• Check your Note path for any obstructions that it can catch on - bolts sticking out are a major issue for these Notes
• Don’t go too crazy with compression - 1" of compression between 2 sets of 2" compliant wheels is the most you’d want to go, and even that is probably overkill
• Notes are grippy on bare polycarb - if you’re trying to use a roller/set of wheels to drive a Note across a flat polycarbonate plate, you’re going to have trouble. Masking tape is a fine solution for reducing friction, as is leaving the film on the polycarb instead of taking it off
• Run your Note through your prototype by hand before running it through under power - do this at all the extreme ends of your prototype to make sure there are no catch points.

If you’ve read this far I hope you’re saying “yeah yeah we know what we’re doing, our prototypes work great”. Awesome for you! That won’t be the case for tons of teams. In fact a bunch of teams at your first event are going to learn these things a little too late! There’s going to be absolute carnage of game pieces this season. We’re going to see what 2020 would’ve been if COVID didn’t shut us down. Week 1 events will be robbing from Week 2 events’ game piece stashes.

We’re going to be playing with things that look like Notes, but are really the ghosts of tortured and mangled Notes that team XXXX’s intake performed cruel acts on. The way the rules are written this season are vague enough that we need to be prepared to play with Notes that have a wide variety of damage done to them.

Hopefully Robot Inspectors take special care to analyze the path that a Note follows through a robot. Hopefully I’m totally wrong and most of these issues are caught before teams take the field…

If not, the field reset crew is going to need a bigger vacuum and we’re all in for a rough time.

6045 Killing a Note

[waialua359]

This is something we thought about.
What if another team or teams from previous matches compromise the integrity of notes? Then as we try to intake or shoot it, it breaks.
I’m assuming we might get a foul or tech foul. Is it really our fault?

How will refs keep track?

[Zook]

Should we build our robots out of NERF material? May be only way to preserve these notes.

[Footie]

I’m thinking that the human players at the source are going to have to do a pull test on notes, as they pick them up, to make sure they don’t immediately come apart, before feeding them through the source. Not ideal, but there’s enough notes at the source that they can hopefully filter out and discard very damaged but not yet technically destroyed ones.

[EricH]

Gambling, mate. G410 applies to humans AND robots.

You’ll note that I’m not saying it’s something that shouldn’t be done–heck, try to do it during field reset so the field staff has a shot at doing something about it–but that if you pull too hard you’re at risk of Tech Fouls after the first one.

[Justin_Montois]

I’ve been worried about Notes coming apart after making contact with the inside of the speaker and jamming up the scoring system.

You can’t even say “Oh we can just count the notes in the speaker after the match” because you wouldn’t know how many were scored while amp’d and I doubt the refs would be able to recognize a jam to be able to try and pivot to manual tallying of scoring. Intact or not, I think there will be jams this year that result in replays.