So I walk in and AG is already talking about his design. Pretty meta: extensible hopper, over-bumper ground intake, single shooter (turret; adjustable hood).
It looks like I’m not the only one affected by powercreep. Taken in perspective, I’m not powercreeping at all. (ok, maybe a bit, a bit overambitious with shoot-on-the-fly…)
Although our mentor is also powercreeping…… \dots not sure if that’s a good thing.
note: powercreep means like increasing in complexity.
We continue debating random aspects of design. Necessity of high climb (design team says yes; I say no). Necessity of turret (consensus is yes but im concerned about powercreep). Necessity of a shooter, at all (design team says yes; i update toward yes, but they should be more open toward non-shooter ideas). How much clogging will happen (design team thinks less, I think more). How many balls to store. etc etc etc.
This continues quite past the point of diminishing returns. But at some point design team starts drawing stuff etc.
Meanwhile like absolutely zero prototyping is happening. Like 1 hour into the meeting and nothing. After waiting a bit I give up and go over and start to make an intake prototype myself.
The nice thing is that it works, very well.
Later I start building a shooter prototype, but then the design members tell me that they’re gonna do something more realistic with wood so I just wait for them. (well they end up waiting on a drill bit or something and i wonder why I didn’t just proceed with the prototype skull)
Some more design stuff. Some more debating with design team on whether high climb is even something useful.
I think at this point I got so used to powercreep that it didn’t even like render for me…
Later on, Mr. Hadzic arrives. He starts lecturing design team on complexity (valid), curse of dimensionality (somewhat valid), what we did in ‘22 (valid), time management (valid), etc.
A somewhat funny moment comes when he asks where the main designer is. Everyone points at AG. “why is your main designer working on the drivetrain?”
After dinner, we think of some more ideas. Having 3 independent channels with indexing and shooting. A feeder bot that does very inaccurate but fast shooting. The team doesn’t really like any of these…
We do some testing with swerve at the bump. It’s a bit harder than it looks (although I think its doable, still). Anyway we have consensus to do swerve even if it means bump is inaccessible.
We do assign one of the more feasible designs (feeder bot) to a (somewhat annoying) freshman (but hey, we were all freshmen once).
At the end we go over design again. It’s still very meta, but at least not so powercrept…
Tomorrow we need more design, more decisions, and more prototyping. Although I really can’t be the one doing the prototyping…
