I’m typing this right before I’m gonna spend 4 hours in Inventor making new designs. (in other words, I’m not helpless, I do design stuff myself).
We have 2 robots. A cortex robot that we have used for most of the season, and a new V5 robot. The cortex robot is a 35x35 hole H-chassis. It has 2 towers in the middle that has a 2-bar lift (for descoring and cap flipping).
The V5 bot is a 30x30 hole H-drive.
We have a tournament on Saturday.
The 2-bar on the Cortex bot hasn’t worked since the end of our last tourney (which we won, it stopped working after). I had plans for a better flipper and a separate de-scorer, but our mentor (not knowing that the 2-bar didn’t work), didn’t let me work on the cortex bot during our 1.75 hour build time this afternoon. Instead, he made me take off the new flipper and leave the bot as-was. There were a few more things that happened but that was the gist of it. We do not have a working cortex bot.
I have redesigned our launcher-intake 3 times already. After building my most recent model today (in the time I wanted to work on the cortex bot) I learned that that intake wouldn’t work as well. I am about to sit down to redesign it AGAIN. We do not have a working V5 bot.
We have 40 minutes tomorrow and that’s about it. What would our best course of action be? Should we attempt to fix up or redo the cortex bot (same difficulty/time for each)? Should we walk in with a V5 pushbot? Should we drop out of the tourney all together? We are already in State.
tl;dr: Broken Cortex bot. Not yet working V5 bot. 40 minutes. Tourney on Saturday.
well there’s not much you can do in 40 minutes tbh… I’d just try to fix the cortex bot…
I’ve rebuild, oh man lets see… 4 times this season already before I was happy.
Realistically if you think you can fix the cortex bot in 40 minuets that’ll probably be your best bet, otherwise v5 pusbot with a small cap flipper on it isn’t a bad idea either.
A tournament provides a long time to work on a robot. You can also get good practice driving and evaluating the competition, some of which could be at state. It doesn’t sound like you will get to work on your robot w/o your mentor present, so you should go.
If you have enough parts to build your V5 w/o taking apart your Cortex, fix the Cortex and work on V5 at the tourney. If not then probably better to start with a V5 pushbot and add to it during the tourney. That’s a bit harder b/c of match schedule however.
BTW, a strong drive train playing defense can make a difference. Many teams don’t like playing defense but it is part of the game.
Ok, I had interpreted <R1>(a)
“a. Teams may not compete with one robot while a second is being modified or assembled.”
as being with the intention of using the second robot at that competition. But, I guess that would be difficult for the EP to track. I will ask this q in the EP forum.
However, since a robot is defined as subsystem 1 (chassis) and 2 (power/brain) but not 3, your could work on 3.
So, i too had this problem for a league competition that we had and we did not have a functional robot the day of the competition and we had about an hour, so we just built a v5 bot with a 6 motor base and a 2 motor cap-flipper + wedge + low flag toggler + robot flipper. Needless to say, it worked pretty well and any robot was scared to try and score anything in front of us. It worked very well and as long as you drive well and play defense wisely, you should be fine. We flipped all the caps to our color and then spent most of the match stopping any team from shooting a ball and also pushed a cap robot halfway across the field in the process. Then, we got center plat and yeeted on anyone who dared to try and take it from us.
Given that the team is on the board - pretty easy for EP to track There will be that other team that will complain about it and use the vex forum post as evidence…
There will be that other team that will complain about it and use the vex forum post as evidence…