Lead up to Champs

Despite the good win at SVR, the work never stops. Brendan's to-do list posted to slack after SVR looks like this:

• ​Replace the rivet (wear indicator) that is being eroded by the wrist chain on the cross plate.
• Replace left rear swerve motor that has a stripped out mounting hole. ...we were only using three mounting bolts instead of four.
• Replace side frame tubes. It's bent, and broken/cracked.
• Left rear support gusset has failing rivets that were reinforced with additional rivets. Please remove the failed rivets and re-rivet. Or leave out the failed rivets so we don't have a false sense of security seeing many rivets on that gusset.
• Battery support cross member should probably have steel bolts rather than rivets that continue to fail.
• Perhaps a shim(s) or strap to reduce battery movement?
• Left front swerve wheel mount with underside bolts. Either those bolts are short, the wheel mount is thicker, or the large belt hub has a thicker floor. Regardless, the bolts don't appear to have as much thread engagement (it could, depending on what the problem is), and I'm concerned about the wheel mount failing.
• It would be great if all eight of those wheel mount bolts were longer by about .250" for more thread engagement and they could sit flush with the hub floor. That would be a GREAT visual indicator to see if the bolts are loosening.
• The six 10-32 swerve bolts that connect thru the 2x1 frame tubes. Once tightened, it would be great to put a thin nylock on the top side as an additional security feature. The bolt already sticks through.
• The corner bolt of the swerve has a standoff supporting the top/bottom piece. It would be great to lengthen that bolt (it sits flush with the top) and add a nylock.
• Some SDS modules are feeling "tight" to turn or drive and/or are getting noisy. I think they should be rebuilt before Houston.
• The wrist chain should be tightened.
• Re-heat shrink the fork tubes.
• Can we replace the Advanced Farm sticker on the bottom to a QR code? ...more fun! ...infinite choices where the code/URL can take the user.
  • Editor's note: Never!
• Remove Limelights
• Consider touching up bumper paint
• Consider lead-in bends for front of intake flaps for wall scrapings
• Shorten forks
• Rotate elevator motor to keep wires from rubbing

Shorks

The forks are doing their jobs well, but the Emma and Yi are finding it unnecessarily difficult to guide the forks under partners because of how long they are. We're going to shorten the forks to help maneuverability. It also opens the option for us to start auto with the arm up at its scoring angle to get the first points on the board faster. 

Supercharging

On the Tuesday after SVR, HQ announced an unprecedented change to the rules. Once the grid has been filled, nodes can be double-scored for an additional 3 points each. To my knowledge, a rules change this big has never been made before. It's also being made with just about no time to adapt strategies or practice.

From our limited testing time, stacking cones onto mid/high nodes seems very reliable. Double-scoring cubes in the hybrid nodes seems fastest, but it's very easy to bump a cube out when putting another one in.

​After a day of testing and talking, we think this change is beneficial to us. 

Divisions

Division assignment  is always one of the most exciting parts of the year. On the Thursday before Champs, we got assigned to Galileo. There is a ton of depth in the division, which means we should be able to hit elims with a strong alliance from any seed. The two teams standing out at the top are 2910 and 3005, but there are a ton of reliably great teams who could come out swinging hard this weekend like 67, 1114, ​1690, 3467, 3476, 4481, and 6800.

Looking across at some other divisions, 254 and 2056 are in a Archimedes together along with some incredibly strong teams, and 1323 and 4414 are together in Hopper.

​The match schedule came out on the Wednesday before Champs, and ours is pretty nice. Statbotics gives our schedule a rating of 0.18, meaning that out of 1000 randomly generated schedules, only 18% of them were easier than the one we got. After our brutal match schedule last year (0.97 on Statbotics), we'll happily take this one. Our hardest match appears to be qm15 where we face 2910 and 4451, but we're backed up by 67 in that match making it a bit of a tossup.