It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just that it’s looking like everyone is caught up on being offensive and not scoring any discs. Of course defense oriented robots exist, and always have, but it’s not as fun of a game when everyone’s just driving into each other awkwardly and no one can score. Idk it’s my subjective opinion, I think games need to have a balance between offensive defensive and passive (like just shooting discs) going on, I think tipping point was the perfect balance of all three, at least before the end with the classic goal over the field so no one can get it strat
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Because its still the early season. It takes time to build a high-quality shooter robot, so for many teams now, its honestly better to have a good defensive robot rather than a half baked shooting one. This ended up being a good decision for 123A, who made semifinals in their WRCT tournament with a rollers only robot.
Besides, matches with defensive robots can actually be quite fun (also defense isn’t awkward if you know how to drive well, just sayin’).
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If you watch any gameplay from other games with turret meta like frc or ftc. They are never ever used in the way you think. Most turret teams shoot from the wall lol. Most turrets will not hold up under any defense. especially for vex due to the lack of a competent vision system. relying on odometry with your turret will literally lead to it drifting in driver and the need to reset. With a turret, I also think you’re forgetting distance control as well lol. You need to be able to shoot from anywhere on the field. Cool! turret does not solve all of your problems regarding that. What you want to do is purely unrealistic, I do think turrets can be useful, but more like in this year’s frc game where it allows you to shoot from the wall to prevent defense in one axis.
In this video the robot gravitates towards some sort of wall structure almost every cycle:
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Best we can do for that is do lots of testing, and try to find every conceivable way to keep Odometry accurate. I think if we can get it down to one reset per match, I’ll be content, since that really won’t cause much trouble. I’m yet to make this code, since I need the coordinates of the walls that Odometry gives me, but I’m gonna make some code that uses distance sensors to check if Odometry is still decently accurate, if you’re facing a wall or a corner. It won’t be automatic or anything but as long as our driver checks every now and then, I think we can overcome that obstacle.
I already coded that and tested it, it works. Just need to be able to convert Odometry coordinates (which as I said I don’t have yet because no drivetrain to test on) to coordinates the flywheel can use. Plus I’m doing some variation of PID (don’t know which combo yet, haven’t tested it out) to keep the speed as constant as possible. Maybe vision sensor might work to spot the goal and guesstimate difference, but I doubt it. Honestly I’m gonna be working during lunch and my computer class, plus robotics meetings every day once school starts, so I believe I will have enough time to test and perfect the code to the best of my ability. Only problem is it’s 2 and a half months before the first tournament… and we still don’t have a full CAD yet. But as you’ve seen, I created a 360 turret design that could honestly be effective if done right. I think I can make it work 
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You worked on a turret before the rest of your bot??? 
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Yeah, only reason why is because I’m not a builder, and have very poor knowledge of what is “good practice”. So I just brainstorm like a madman and do some basic “gist of it” cads. We already have the design done basically, it’s just that we have to accurately 3D model it
We do have the 3D model of the drivetrain though, and our builders are working on the intakes and flywheel today. Hopefully tomorrows meeting we completely finish building the drivetrain and start in the intake
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When a FTC world finalist team abandons a “magic button” scoring macro that would automatically drive to the shipping hub and score a piece of indexed freight (in a game with less defense and encoders with higher resolution than VEX ones mind you) because their “position tracking just wasn’t consistent enough”, I think its safe to say that you are going to need a lot of resets to make your “odometry-powered-turret” work for the entirety of a match. For programming skills, sure, go ahead, but you are going to have a hard time getting it to work in a game with more defense and worse pre-conditions for accurate odometry (worse sensors, no custom parts outside of plastic limit, highly less restrictive scoring routes, etc.).
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Why would you believe one sensor reading over another? The distance sensors have their own limitations, and have potential to give unreliable readings. How do you decide what your “ground truth” is. This is a hard problem; Tesla has famously (and recently) stopped using their distance sensors and are (supposedly) relying purely on their cameras for FSD Beta.
You seem to be layering complexity on top of complexity in this endeavor. If you can pull it off, tip-o-the-hat to you, but if something doesn’t seem to be working, don’t be afraid to take a step back, figure out what the real needs are, and use your time wisely.
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well considering I haven’t actually built the robot, or tested Odometry, or done literally anything except write the undebugged code and do testing with the velocity equation, I don’t really have a thing of it not working. However, I understand that it will be extremely difficult to keep Odometry accurate. Again, I’m gonna try to do all the work I can to find a way to aim at the goal and shoot accurately. Maybe the vision sensor could work, maybe I could try to do some code for “bracing for impact” before the robot hits an opponent and prevent “jumping” (I have an idea for how it’d work, but my driver said we should wait until we see it’s needed to do it), maybe it’s not even a problem at all and we only need to reset once. But regardless, one way or another, I’m gonna put my all into it, and if it doesn’t work then I guess I’ll have learned a ton. Better than wasting my days playing video games all day at least lol
Plus we’re building our robot with modularity in mind, and also making a meta bot first (since our competitions so close, we don’t want to put our eggs for turret in one basket), so if we ever decide the turret ideas horrible, then we just slap the meta system on. Intakes compatible with both the 360 turret and the flywheel so it’s only taking out maybe 16 screws (guesstimating). We’re also extremely fine with changing our strategy, since I think that if we manage to score 20 discs in 30 seconds, then we don’t have to worry about Odometry getting off in the course of a match. Testing and time is all I think we need to make this design viable.
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That is a ton of trouble. Even if it takes you 2 seconds to get to your reset spot, that is considerably more time than the turret actually saves. Also, you give up at least 1 motor. This motor could be used to speed up performance in other areas of the bot.
Tl;dr: turrets are very inefficient.
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Not really, considering our strategy. We’re going head on to prevent others from aiming and pushing them around the field. If we’re pushing them around the field we don’t have time to aim obviously, with a turret we can still intake and shoot. This means if we spend 60 seconds of a match pushing someone, that’s 60 seconds of shooting saved. Even though you can still get the discs in with a proper strategy (maybe) you won’t be able to prevent your opponent from getting the same amount. In the way we’re looking to use them, turrets are both a shield AND a sword, and that’s the important part
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Your team is not good enough at building to make a working turret, and no programming will work without good hardware as support.
I will eat a whole lemon in vtow vc if someone makes a turret that is actually effective.
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You do realize this is going to completely destroy any kind of accurate Odom with tracking wheels, right?
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@RoboKodas_77000X is making a turret for MOA. Given Kaden’s track record, I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a version of it working in time for then.
(Also I highly doubt that a 2nd year VRC programmer on a new team would be able to get a working auto-aiming turret working in VRC, when more experienced FTC teams have yet to develop a competitively viable odometry based auto-scoring macro lul).
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You better get stocked up on lemons.
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Not a new team at all? Our driver and one of our builders have been around for 4 years (VRC), I’ve been around for 4 as well (if you count IQ of course, not counting spin up as that has not concluded) and our other builder has been around for two.
You’d be surprised actually. We have very good build quality on our builds, despite how jank it looks. And we’re also creative enough to think of solutions to problems (hence, 360 turret). More importantly than all that is that we have a whole group of teams working on this together. Some of these teams have even built turrets in the past. With all this support, I do truly believe we can get something working. However it is premature to say what will and what will not work. We don’t even have a fully built drivetrain yet, and it’s relatively difficult to visualize how effective certain things will be. since I’m putting in the time, and a lot of it, i think these problems can be solved. I figured out reader auton, I figured out the so called “Bradley hook”, and I’ll certainly figure this ordeal out, especially with all the help we have.
I’ll bring the turret, you bring the lemons 
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Considering how our robot never broke once in the entirety of the year, had extremely low friction on all wheels, had a more powerful hook than basically any competition (we could steal goals extremely easily because of how strong it was, despite having contact in a very small location), and the fact that it was more durable than all of our sister teams robots (except E, their robot was very well built) I’d argue otherwise. And in the time since we’ve grown, and we built basically 90% of that robot before November of last year. this year we’re coming in hot.
Don’t forget the lemons
Also this thread has gotten REALLY off topic thanks to me keeping this convo going so let’s just not do that anymore
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4 years is not experience. This is my 4th year I have not won a tourney. It depends on what you do
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same here, years != good
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