Robot Arm C

[jander14indoor]

Unofficial, etc...

Retired1, I'm pretty sure you have the inner and outer edge of the tape reversed. Go back and check the rules. The competition zone perimeter is defined by the the inner edge of the tape, meaning the tape defining the perimeter of the competition zone is itself out of bounds. And the diagram clearly shows the objects touching the inner edge.

Bazinga+, I don't think you can plan on much, if any, space between the last ping pong ball and pencil and out of bounds.

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

[Bazinga+]

Unofficial, etc...

Retired1, I'm pretty sure you have the inner and outer edge of the tape reversed. Go back and check the rules. The competition zone perimeter is defined by the the inner edge of the tape, meaning the tape defining the perimeter of the competition zone is itself out of bounds. And the diagram clearly shows the objects touching the inner edge.

Bazinga+, I don't think you can plan on much, if any, space between the last ping pong ball and pencil and out of bounds.

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

So how do they determine when it is out of bounds? I mean like if you pick the ball straight up, it might cross over the line by like a mm. I just dont think having the pencil/ball less than a mm (in theory infinitely close) to the border line is a good event design.

[jander14indoor]

The center of the ball where it touches down is the radius of the ball away from out of bounds. Remember its TOUCHING out of bounds that zeros the points, not hanging in the air out of bounds.
Pencil, yes the last one is HARD, the rest, given their length, aren't easy. As to event design, that gets into opinion, how far down to you think we should be looking at perfect scores for Nationals?? Last time we ran this event with this kind of setup the top 15 or so teams got perfect scores and we ended up using the third tie breaker to figure out first through 6th... Not good event design either.

Now, as I've suggested before, there is an easy (at least a conceptually) way to solve that. Put a fence on that boundary as your first action. I can think of multiple ways to do it. A pair of flippers on the back of your arm base that flip out and block the boundary is one. Fences that slide more or less straight out from the back edge for another. Place some walls with your arm for a third. And more.

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

[Bazinga+]

The center of the ball where it touches down is the radius of the ball away from out of bounds. Remember its TOUCHING out of bounds that zeros the points, not hanging in the air out of bounds.
Pencil, yes the last one is HARD, the rest, given their length, aren't easy. As to event design, that gets into opinion, how far down to you think we should be looking at perfect scores for Nationals?? Last time we ran this event with this kind of setup the top 15 or so teams got perfect scores and we ended up using the third tie breaker to figure out first through 6th... Not good event design either.

Now, as I've suggested before, there is an easy (at least a conceptually) way to solve that. Put a fence on that boundary as your first action. I can think of multiple ways to do it. A pair of flippers on the back of your arm base that flip out and block the boundary is one. Fences that slide more or less straight out from the back edge for another. Place some walls with your arm for a third. And more.

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

My concern is that whether a pencil was out of bounds or not can become quite contaversial. But I guess since its when the bottom of the pencil touches out of bounds that gives a good mm or so.

[Bazinga+]

The rules state that dies with even numbers facing up receive 6 points, and that those dies have to be 'sitting flat within the competition area'. So of you drop a die into an egg carton and it is even side up, is that 6 points? I'm just wondering because the bottom of the egg carton probably isn't perfectly flat.

[jander14indoor]

Still not official...

You don't get any points for putting the dice in the egg cartons, so why would you? Put them on the surface and avoid the ambiguity.

Jeff Anderson
Livonia, MI

[samlan16]

For those of you using master-slave controls, how much of a competitive advantage did you gain versus using a laptop or joystick? Does it make your runs go faster?

[Bazinga+]

For those of you using master-slave controls, how much of a competitive advantage did you gain versus using a laptop or joystick? Does it make your runs go faster?

Its much better imo. Ive tried using all 3 and im positive that at most state competitions the top 3 teams will all use master-slave control systems. These are superior in that if it takes like 2 hours to learn to consistently get a full score using a master-slave control system, then it will probably take you like 4 hours with a joystick or 6 hours from a computer. THEORETICALLY either of those could work, but master-slave is much less expensive than a remote control so I dont see why you wouldn;t use it. Hope this helped.

[UQOnyx]

For those of you using master-slave controls, how much of a competitive advantage did you gain versus using a laptop or joystick? Does it make your runs go faster?

Its much better imo. Ive tried using all 3 and im positive that at most state competitions the top 3 teams will all use master-slave control systems. These are superior in that if it takes like 2 hours to learn to consistently get a full score using a master-slave control system, then it will probably take you like 4 hours with a joystick or 6 hours from a computer. THEORETICALLY either of those could work, but master-slave is much less expensive than a remote control so I dont see why you wouldn;t use it. Hope this helped.

How would you recommend coding for a master slave system? I'd assume that you are probably using an arduino. Using a potentiometer combined with an arduino seems to be pretty easy, but would I need to have some sort of smoothing code as well?

[Bazinga+]

For those of you using master-slave controls, how much of a competitive advantage did you gain versus using a laptop or joystick? Does it make your runs go faster?

Its much better imo. Ive tried using all 3 and im positive that at most state competitions the top 3 teams will all use master-slave control systems. These are superior in that if it takes like 2 hours to learn to consistently get a full score using a master-slave control system, then it will probably take you like 4 hours with a joystick or 6 hours from a computer. THEORETICALLY either of those could work, but master-slave is much less expensive than a remote control so I dont see why you wouldn;t use it. Hope this helped.

How would you recommend coding for a master slave system? I'd assume that you are probably using an arduino. Using a potentiometer combined with an arduino seems to be pretty easy, but would I need to have some sort of smoothing code as well?

Pretty sure the easiest way to code it is using the 'knob' example on arduino under 'Servo'. If you wanna be fancy you can make it smoother by making the servo go to the average between the target position and current position and just loop that. Use a variable and map it from 0 to 1000 onto 0 to 180. And to make it smooth make the input (current pos.+target pos.)/2. Just play around with it, arduino programming is pretty self explanatory.