Day 3: Cone Intake, robot sketch, and game manual notes

Pinch Roller Cone Intake

One of our students devised an elegant solution for a game object mechanism that deals with both balls and cones. The circles are tubes, and it intakes cones from the top. Here is a very early prototype:

Elevator + Slider

This is one of our favorite sketches of a robot that can reach the top cone-scoring location and do most of the top items on our priority list.

• The Slanted Elevator allows you to reach further as you raise the carriage.

• The slider lets you extend towards the mid and top rows.

• We use the length of the cone to reduce the extension needed to reach the top cone locations.

• The cone pinch intake doubles as a ball intake

• A flywheel/roller would let us launch balls to score them quickly in auton.
  
  

New things in the manual

• District points for playoffs are official, according to the manual.

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• The 5th/6th and 7th/8th placed alliances don’t receive any Advancement Points

• The points for each team are awarded based on the percentage of your alliance’s match wins that your team played in. So for an alliance without a backup robot, everyone gets 100% of the ALLIANCE Advancement Points. 

• If a backup robot were to play 1 of 4 match wins for the alliance, they would receive 25% of the Advancement Points, and the team they replaced for that match would receive 75% of the Advancement Points.

• Playoff tiebreakers are only Tech Fouls and not all fouls

• This is a good improvement. 

• New Champs Division Names

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• We believe the Milstein division is honoring César Milstein, and the Johnson division is honoring Katherine Johnson, but we haven’t seen an announcement yet.

• R304 Blue Box

• It’s now explicitly written that “running a 3D printer or other automated manufacturing processes overnight producing ROBOT parts” is against the rules.