Day one was a blast, I personally think this will be a great game. Our team has mixed feelings, and chiefdelphi is about 60% thinking the game is meh. I love the game because its not a shooting game and it doesn’t have climbing. Not a very high bar, but its a great change of pace.

First Impressions:

• The field is very open and I like this. It makes it harder to play good/effective defense.
• The cycle distance is very far. You have to run the full length of the field to grab a game piece and again to score it.
• The game isn’t swerve hostile out of the gate. We have some things we need to figure out before we know if we can run swerve or not(tomorrow’s problem). This excites us because we’d love to run our new swerve drive.
• Cones look hard to pick up.
• Sight lines from all driver stations are unobstructed. This makes the game amazing to play for the drive team.
• A kit bot can score pieces, and play the end game with nothing extra added!!

Our kick off went according to plan, so we ended for the day after we had a team discussion about each group’s scoring analysis. It feels a little odd not diving into what our robot must do, but I like this change. At my day job(I don’t get paid to do FRC yet…) we’ve been pushing choices off a lot until we learn more information about the problem and the solutions and that has been incredibly helpful. I think this approach will work wonders for this year. We currently don’t know a few things:

• How hard it is to intake cones. They can be ~4 unique positions and that makes intaking them hard.
• How hard it is to be DOCK and ENGAGED with two robots on the CHARGING STATION during end game. Is it worth figuring out a way to guarantee being ENGAGED? And is it worth the extra points?
• Can a cone mechanism also pick up cubes?
• How do cones fall out of the portal?

We need to figure out these questions before we can solidify our list of what the robot must do, could do, and won’t do.

Scoring Analysis

This activity went well this year, the updated template was a success. Most of the groups used the template to do their calculations. We learned a few things from the scoring analysis:

• Docking in auto is great points, however only one robot can dock so back up auto plans will be needed.
• The difference in points between high and mid scoring locations isn’t that high at 2 points per cycle. This makes it hard to justify the added complexity.
• A team could get away with only being able to score cubes or cones. Again this makes it hard to justify the added complexity of doing both.
• The SUSTAINABILITY RP is very hard to solo.
• The ACTIVATION RP is impossible to do with only one robot, but what if you drag a partner along?

Tomorrow our team takes a look at making a first pass on our robot’s must do, could do, and won’t do list. We also are planning on starting prototyping, field build and anything else we can think of!