Drivetrain friction, measured the dumb way

We wanted a number for drivetrain friction that didn't come from a datasheet. The dumb method: put the robot on a field tile, lift one end of the tile until the robot breaks loose, and read the angle off a phone inclinometer. The tangent of that angle is your coefficient of friction, no load cell required.

Three runs each on fresh tiles, worn tiles, and tiles with field dust gave us 0.61, 0.55, and 0.47. The spread between fresh and dusty is the interesting part — it's the difference between climbing the ramp and theatrically failing to, which is roughly how we found out during a scrimmage.

The clip above is the placeholder demo for the <Clip> component: self-hosted file, preload="metadata", poster frame, muted loop. Short silent footage that illustrates a mechanism belongs here; anything with narration belongs in a <YouTube> embed instead.