This first week has gone quite slowly. And a lot of it is our (my) fault.
One big thing I did wrong, and that perhaps everyone did wrong, is overestimating the capability of our team members. This was really our fault, I should’ve made sure to know this info before the season started. But after the season started it took a while for me to realize that our designers RS and RM aren’t really capable of designing prototypes for us to build. And that if I grab literally anyone and tell them “cut this”, it probably won’t get done. Including some of our captains :facepalm:.
It took me a while to figure out who actually is useful enough so I can draw something and tell them to cut it, and it’ll get done. And I have to figure out the prototypes myself.
Really, I feel like we have like 1.5 useful design members and 2-3 useful mechies (for prototyping). There’s probably more, but either I haven’t found them or they are working on something useless (e.g. the field). The rest of the members really aren’t that useful.
It also sucks that nobody takes responsibility for things, so if I want something done I have to chase after them to get it done. We should also get a dedicated prototyping team for the first week, of people who can execute prototypes very fast. The goal should literally be to have your robot prototyped out in week 1.
Some other technical things, for prototyping, that should always be done:
- Use wood. Wood is the best.
- The next best is 3d prints. But they take a while sometimes, so don’t use it for anything big.
- Correspondingly, metal sucks. It sucks to drill holes in. And we have more wood anyway. Although punch tube is probably nicer than sheet or box tube.
- Annoying thing about wood is bearings (actually it looks like this was just a skill issue by whoever :skull:). In any case we should make a ton of flange bearings pre-season for use on wood.
- Drills are nice. We need more drill batteries, 2 is not enough for our team.
- Neo Vortexes (Vortices?) are the goats for when you need motors. You can direct drive them, enough said.
- Etape beats shaft collars.
- We should have motor mounts ready, like flange bearings.
A brief update on the bingo (bold is checked off, strikethrough is not going to happen)
| I don’t approve the design | No dinner in week 4 | Someone says “no but we have the plasma cutter” | Every single part in sight touches the CNC | Something breaks really badly pre-comp |
| We do worse than pingry | Drivetrain not done by end of week 2 | We make a design with \ge 3 DOFs | We stay after 10 PM | I give up and decide grinding USACO is a better use of time |
| We can’t mount something | Nontrivial robot mechanical changes in last week | We don’t make lehigh | No autos | Programming gets <2 weeks of time |
| < 10 hours of driving practice time | Project management doesn’t last past week 3 | Design not finalized by week 1 | Failure is blamed on anything other than ourselves | |
| Driver tryouts never happens | We score 0 points in at least one match | I say something and nobody listens to me, but I’m right |
