Holy wallbots batman

[Gallium]

As with wallbots, I think they do have potential to be really good, but it will take a lot more R&D to make a truly great wallbot.

I think that in this game wallbots can never be truly effective because of this ruling:

EasyC V4 Cortex Interrupt Watcher Help

Since the object will always return to the zone of the robot that deflected it out of bounds, an opposing robot could score “over” a wall bot simply by throwing an object off the wall in such a way that the object bounces out of play and is returned to the other side of the fence.
That being said, this design is still really impressive, and I love to see people taking a different approach to the game and building cool designs.

[Barin]

@7447C Twisted Wire

@blatwell I was considering using PROS, but I heard that it crashes a lot and has a tendency to corrupt your code.

Please keep this thread on topic. See here about PROS.

[Aponthis]

@7447C Twisted Wire

@blatwell I was considering using PROS, but I heard that it crashes a lot and has a tendency to corrupt your code.

I don’t want to go off the rails but I’ve run PROS on two different low-end laptops and have had no such issues.

[Highwayman]

@Aponthis

I don’t want to go off the rails but I’ve run PROS on two different low-end laptops and have had no such issues.

The anecdotal rumors about PROS are getting to be a little . . . upsetting

[Aponthis]

@Highwayman

The anecdotal rumors about PROS are getting to be a little . . . upsetting

Definitely. That’s why I felt the need to respond here, even if it’s off-topic, just so people reading it don’t think it’s true.

I heard of a guy who had PROS blow up his batteries… Turns out it burnt his whole school down. (Sarcasm, obviously.)

[9065_Parker]

Cmon people, keep it on topic, wallbots not PROS

[DanielIW26]

@LEER

Still a work in progress… (40/40 in quals lol)

Premature robot specs:
-10 motor holonomic drive
-wall
-fits in the size limit, trust me, we’ve passed inspection loads of times after being called out

Wall:
We can lower each of the three section individually so are partners can score over.

https://youtu.be/-CGx8hBKrSs

Expansion:
-fairly quick
-fairly reliable

Collapsing:

-incredibly time consuming
-incredibly annoying
-incredibly painful

Just looking forward to winning at least one match tomorrow with the wallbot

I am so glad that someone has built a solid wallbot this year. They always seem so flimsy and never seem to work our very well.
Great job.

[Ankush_G]

@viper

I don’t believe that wall bots are going to work at worlds. So everyone on the clawbot hype train, don’t worry. Why don’t I think so? It’s because only things that have been tested and tournament-hardened will work. Clawbots have been created all over the world and have been proven to work very well so they won’t be defeated very easily. This is the exact reason why you see clawbots in state finals and not pushbots. The hype for pushbots died down so quickly and the reason why is above. As for wall bots, I feel that if it was introduced and used a lot early in the season, then it would be a threat, but it wasn’t. So wallbots are gonna be weak.

So my interpretation is that if a design has been cumulatively tested by a lot of teams, it’s likely for it to be more effective than a design that is only used by a few teams, even if they have tested and perfected it themselves? I don’t think number of teams using the design should necessarily be a factor.

Case in point: Vex IQ Highrise in 2015. Discobots basically had engineered a very effective and simple mechanism to score. It was so blatantly simple that they had to make sure pictures of it didn’t get leaked at all, or it was basically destined to become the new meta. A lot of other teams took this weird approach of like this really complex claw stacking mechanism. That was the most popular design, and most people didn’t expect any other to actually win. Then came disco, with a design no one had seen before but still managed to sweep awards at worlds. The idea is that as long as your individual design is actually good, it shouldn’t really matter how many other teams have “hardened” a similar design alongside you.

[technik3k]

@phantom285A

Case in point: Vex IQ Highrise in 2015. Discobots basically had engineered a very effective and simple mechanism to score. It was so blatantly simple that they had to make sure pictures of it didn’t get leaked at all, or it was basically destined to become the new meta. A lot of other teams took this weird approach of like this really complex claw stacking mechanism. That was the most popular design, and most people didn’t expect any other to actually win. Then came disco, with a design no one had seen before but still managed to sweep awards at worlds. The idea is that as long as your individual design is actually good, it shouldn’t really matter how many other teams have “hardened” a similar design alongside you.

I think somebody at Discobots understands Engineering Design Cycle really well and they have the discipline to follow it methodically. You don’t need huge number of teams to keep trying random things in order to find a great solution. In majority of cases you could find it with a directed search.

On the other hand, when enough talented people choose to follow the unique paths in spite of everybody else telling them it is not going to work - then we get some truly innovative designs like the one we see in this thread.

@LEER, thank you for building and sharing with us your wallbot - it is definitely one of the designs I am going to remember from this season!