Today was our team debrief from the Austin District Event. We sat the team down and talked as group about things that went well and things that didn’t go well.

The list got a very messy, we’ll add that under the bad category and do a bit better next time. I also might suggest we break it out into robot and not robot related items. Some of the key improvements we want for Amarillo are decreasing the bounce out, increasing our auto score, color sensors working, speeding up climb, and possibly adding the traversal climb.

I have a few different entries on the bad list. As drive coach I should be a little more forceful/convincing other teams that our autonomous is better/more reliable. I also missed a few opportunities to keep shooting when we were ahead by points and attempt the cargo rp, instead I told the driver to go climb.

The CAD students started working on sorting out the remaining few bits of the traversal climb. The programming students took scouting app feedback, and made a list of items to finish before Amarillo. Some of the key programming improvements are color sensor, more auto points, and traversal climb.

We experimented with adding some PTFE(teflon) to the back of the shooter hood today. The thought is that very slippery backing will help reduce backspin which should help reduce bounce out. We filmed shooting with and with out the PTFE in high speed video(1/8th slowmo). Then we calculated how many times the cargo spins in x amount of seconds. With out the PTFE we got 2 seconds(of video at 1/8) to rotate 1080 degrees 4320 rotations a real second. With the PTFE we got 1.5 seconds(video at 1/8speed) 360 rotation or 1920 rotations a second. So this one change reduced the backspin by 75%. Is it enough? I don’t know, we don’t have an accurate upper hub to test it on.