Hello all! So I just realized how this season my team spent somewhere around 5 months total hardwaring and a total of 5 days softwaring. I always thought that the hardware time: software time ratio was large but I never thought it was that large and I would like it to be a lot smaller. so my question is what is everyone’s hardware time:software time and do you think it should be greater or smaller?
I dont recall seeing your design change that much.
We had about a month of hardware per robot with practice time on top of that. Programming was still just a week per robot though
My robot’s primary design didn’t change almost at all but we kept changing the feeder or trying (and failing) to get the wheels faster and the puncher that never worked but what really slowed us down is an all new team besides a software captain so no one on my team actually knew how to fix our hardware so it took us a long time…
Hardware is always much longer, why? Because the hardware can change and will change, You will need to change your design during a season if you want to be good, but most of the time the software does not need a dramatic change. This year every new robot I have had I just had to change the motors and sensors setup, and a few PID tunings. Auto is easy because I have many functions that make it quick.
Our program took 20 minutes to build the driver portion because we don’t use tbh, pid, or sensors to aid driver mode.
I’d our hardware time : software time was about 20:1
But this ended up holding you back with your flywheel as it would have had a much better rate of fire with one of those or a custom one
We already ran the flywheel at 127 so velocity controll would not give us a faster fire rate. We decreased compression and stuff and got about 2 balls per second.
I was at every tournament you were at aside from 1 or 2 and I never saw you fire that fast…
We just got that fire rate for states.
If what you are saying is true you should have scored much more in your matches.
Back on topic here, I like having the same or a similar design for long periods of time to perfect it so I usually have only 3-4 iterations of our robot per year
I would say, that although programming is important, it should be second to hardware. You can pump out a PID loop filled monster test program in a couple of hours. The theory is to get something that works well, finish the program in question so nothing’s broken :D, then turn up to some scrimmages to test it in competition…
I think the main reason that they didn’t use tbh, pid or customs was because they had relied on a linear puncher for a majority of the season, and had added the single flywheel nearing the end of the season. The programmer, who I personally know, new to VEX, and while he has picked up quite a lot, pid and tbh, not to mention a custom program, would have been quite a strain in such a short amount of time. Other than that, their fire rate was a bit slower than Cameron announced, but I can’t be sure.
We’ve certainly spent more time on programming this year than most years before. There are a lot of subsystems on flywheel robots that I would argue are more complicated on the programming side, such as the flywheel. However, this does not mean that we’ve spent more time on code than actually building. I’d say it’s about 3:1 (building vs code) for us.
Our hardware:software time was probably about 4:1.
This year is definitely more by a lot. The little robot that could was about 1:1. If I wanted it to just be good enough to work and was okay with dry firing / faster consistent loading I could have programmed it a lot faster.