Not to harp, or be to harsh, but let’s go back to what I said to @9MotorGang… I think there is yet another learning opportunity here.
I have been in the competitional robotics setting for 13+ years. Do you know how many times a fellow student, or a mentor even, had told me a design absolutely would not work? Do you know how many times they were correct in that absolutely preemptive assumption? Well let me tell you through experience that the odds are not in the favor of the one shooting down the idea.
Not to toot my own horn, but:
I’ve had 2 completely independent “That idea will totally not work” mechanisms make appearances on FRC’s equivalent of Freedom Hall. Both times I was told they would not work before we even tested it. But they made it to the finals of the finals. Not too bad for “absolutely not going to work”. One of these robots even walked (drove) away with the Championship win.
Maybe the ideas were bad. Maybe the initial thought was not a great thought. But what came out of it was good. What came from that bad idea was greatness.
I have said this probably a million times. If you have worked with me on a project and have been part of the brainstorming stage, you’d have heard what I’m about to say a hundred times per project. I share this with you because I find this to be absolutely true.
There is a such thing as a bad idea. But I want to hear every single bad idea. Because great ideas are born from a bad idea. More information is always better than less. And if you say something I think is dumb, I will immediately think of a way to make it better. And that’s how the ideation process works.
So if you made it through all my long winded comments on this thread and want a single takeaway from it all. I ask you to remember this:
Bad ideas spawn incredibly great solutions.