As FRC grows, the community (or at least the Chief-active community) has started to drift towards similar “big picture” solutions on how to do things. Most of us here will tell you to use wheels to pick up virtually any game piece, or to avoid scissor lifts at all costs.
In contrast, what are the things your team does that give you minor edges? Little upgrades that take just take a few minutes or a design concepts that are easy to implement that improve your performance by 1%? I know this is a philosophy that @jjsessa puts to good use, so I want to see what the community has to offer
Design a robot where you can build out the electronics early rather than late (should probably follow this more on the FTC team too). Not having a huge hole in the middle of the bot means you can get driving and electrical fundamentals dealt with early when you only build one robot.
From last year - zip tying down the roboRIO, we were getting disconnects when just dual locked down
Spring loaded power connector to roboRIO instead of the screw terminal
Having a physical set of switches to choose our auto mode - there are still enough teams running into dashboard oddities that I like the confidence of physical switches
Having spare parts well organized at competition - my joke answer is that having the Stanley 10 and 25 compartment organizers started letting us win events
Pre match system check checklist. Before comp list out what issues you could possibly have with your robot and test out each of these risks before every match while inspecting for anything off. 99 time out of 100 this may not catch any issues but that 1 time that you need it can save you a match.
Stole this from another team (I think 2910) - we have a little on/off switch on our bot that toggles brake/coast mode for our motors while the robot is disabled. Makes setup and moving the bot around a breeze!
The simplest, dumbest, quickest thing you can do to make your robot less likely to die on the field, is hot glue signal (and some low voltage power) connections anywhere that they aren’t really snug. Stuff like the power to the VRM, or your network ports. The hot glue isn’t so strong that you can’t get it off, but it holds it in place, and also acts as a shock absorber for when you get hit.
Yeah, make sure to learn from us though. We ran into an issue that we just could not solve no matter how hard we tried at Houston, and we all just had no idea what was going on. Finally, we realized that our brake mode switch could be toggled in teleop, and apparently our switch had an internal failure that when vibrated, it could flip the switch, putting all our motors on coast in the middle of a game, rendering us useless. Make sure in code you DISABLE the functionality of the switch DURING TELEOP
Something to be careful about — when hot glue cools, it contracts a little, putting more strain on whatever you just tried to secure. This can result in a new failure point, so make sure you test run things in a “rugged” way before you go to the field after hot gluing. This caused us problems in elims last year.
Core programming team members and mentors all get a flashdrive prior to an event that contains all installables needed to run our robot as well as other teams’ robots. Includes a zip of our competition tagged commit, all wpilib, vscode, NI game tools, etc etc installers and offline files.
Each flashdrive is meant to be labeled with user’s name and date of latest update. Especially useful for events that have no cell service or wifi.
A thing I do for all my projects:
A parts list complete with CAD references (if applicable), COTS links and costs.
Also heavy McMaster-Carr utilization.
In general, process. Resources are what they are and differ for all teams but what you can always control is your preparedness and protocols.
I plan to simulate a bunch of pre match/post match situations with drive team and the pit crew. Indiana districts are usually good for one 3 match turnaround per event so making sure DT can effectively/manage time and emotions is crucial. General high pressure prep.
Also, I really like redundancy for checklists. Two people independently check anything on pre-match lists. Balances accountability and reduces mistakes. To anyone who has ramped off their own charge station onto an alliance member in auto, you get it.
Cut corners (literally). Material on the outside of parts typically serves no function and can be removed for a small amount of weight
Running proper anti-integral windup goes a long way and can eliminate windup with like 2 lines of code.
Increase stiffness. Ok this one can get you a lot more than 1% in many cases, but with the exception of intakes getting rammed into other robots, improving stiffness greatly improves reliably and ease of control (for both your drivers and software)
I HIGHLY recommend NOT doing this and just turn your robot off to put it in coast mode.
Its typically not a desirable feature to have your robot roll 10ft on disable and touch the corner of your climbed alliance partner invalidating a ton of points. Seen it way to many times.
Figure out the one thing you have to do. Get it and the drive train going first and start driver practice quickly. Things 2 and 3 can follow once you have thing 1 right.
We didn’t always do it, but when we did, we did way more than one percent better. [Bryce did say simple, not easy, right?]
