[CRUSH-build] Preparation for Las Vegas

[Bill Bennett]

Wow, a ton of good thinking going on out there on the e-team. Thanks for 
kicking it off Chris, and for the well thought through analysis and choice 
set.

Also, thanks to Wes I think for moving the discussion from ALL to BUILD. 
There are parents who don't build, and some admin people, on the ALL list 
who almost certainly don't want to see or read all the nitty gritty 
technical email.

On the pushing around issue, I think Chris has it right. The design that 
makes it easy to turn is the reason we're easy to push. You guys watched 
more matches than I did, but it did seem to me that very few bots could 
shoot the center goal while being pushed, so I'm not sure this is a big 
disadvantage. In any case, I'm not much open to changing the wheel design at 
this point.

Wes, from your writing it sounds like you may think we have Kareem to work 
on - we don't. All robots are cloistered away until the last competition. 
Unless a team has a second robot for test/prototype/practice (many teams do) 
it's hard to fully test an idea between comps. So testing the conveyor belt 
design would require some kind of prototype frame, another motor, etc, and 
then still there would be some risk that we hadn't understood it well enough 
that it would work on the real Kareem hardware.

I would add this to Chris's pro/con list: we don't really know how well the 
barf mode of the roller collector (or the conveyor collector for that 
matter) will shoot the corner goal. When you turn on the motor to barf out 
the balls:
- will the motor have enough torque to start if 2 or 3 balls are already up 
against it?
- if so, will the speed of the first couple of balls be sufficient to go 
into the goal?
- will the belt drive survive repeated reversals?

For the record, I had misread the fix-it window rules before, and probably 
communicated this wrong interpretation to some people. We are in fact 
permitted to build parts that change or add function to the robot (UPGRADE 
PARTS) during the fix-it periods following competitions. I knew we could 
make UPGRADE PARTS, I had just misread what an UPGRADE PART was. Here's my 
summary of the fix-it rules as they apply to us:
- there are two 5 hour periods per week, usable starting Sunday morning and 
ending 5 pm Friday. During these periods we can:
- do unrestricted software development
- make identical SPARE parts, improved reliability REPLACEMENT parts, and 
changed or new function UPGRADE parts

Outside the fix-it periods, we can do lots of other work without 
restriction: discuss, design, prototype and test ideas (as long as parts 
made for the prototype are not used on the robot in competition), plan game 
strategy, refurbished the travel kit, etc. None of this is restricted.

Given this, I believe we can legally make all the parts for a conveyor belt 
collector, and take them to Las Vegas. It's really a question of whether we 
have that much time and energy before Las Vegas, whether we want to give up 
the day of practice, and possibly risk loosing some time Friday as well. 
Chris's points about finding a right balance between enjoying the 
competition and spending high stress time in the pits is well taken.

I think we should spend some non-fix-it window time thinking through the 
design of both the conveyor collector and the sweep/barf designs, then 
decide what to work on. The decision will depend significantly on how 
available and willing people are for the work. Let's start on that today. 
I.e. today will not be a fix-it window meeting.

Bill