Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

Just received email from FRC reminder to share our rookie year experiences.
I will try to categorize so it's easy to read and hope this information will be helpful to future rookie teams.

1. FRC is not about building robots. In my opinion, it's about learning life skills while having "hardest fun you ever had" and letting others to have fun as well.
2. At the kick-off thoroughly check your Kit of Parts for missing items. If anything missing, especially key components, sound alarm right away. Time is of an essence. If parts cannot be provided right away from FRC, seek help from other veteran FRC Teams, because they may have spare parts they can share.
3. Read the rules. Read the rules again and then read rules 20 more times. We made a mistake of designating only 1 person to be responsible to know all the rules. Everybody need to know the rules in it's entirety. First, so you can follow the rules and second, that you can constructively and respectfully challenge judges, referees and inspectors if they happened to make a mistake.
4. There is more to rules than whats written.
   Seek help from veteran FRC teams. Especially when it's first year for everyone on the team.
5. Get as many parts that you can locally. Time is of an essence. Pay extra for quick delivery. Some of our orders took 3-4 weeks to arrive. It's a killer for 6 week project.
6. Students,
   • Treat mentors with utmost respect. Mentors take time from their families to help you by sharing knowledge, skills and abilities. It hurts deeply when students constantly disrespectfully interrupting. Even if you think that you know everything, treat mentors with respect.
   • Treat other students with respect. Firstly, it's a right and wise thing to do. Secondly, if you figure you know everything and can do everything - go and start your own team and see how that will turn out. Everybody has something to contribute.
   • Ask mentors questions and then listen to the answers. Mentors a lot to contribute, even if it's just a life experience. So soak as much as you can from their life experience, so it can help yours.
7. Teamwork. I find it that it's one of the hardest parts. Especially considering that in my experience a lot of technically inclined people tend to be introverts. Start team building as early as possible. Half way through 6 week building season is way too late. It'd be better to start in September :). Plan some fun activities into the schedule.
8. Design. You are not here to reinvent the wheel. It's not cheating to take some design ideas from other teams or from other years. I mean, if you are capable to reinvent the wheel within FRC Rules constrains and time limitations, by all means - go for it. In that case you are probably won't be reading this anyways :)
   Once again, seek help from other teams. This forum is great resource with a lot of good people willing to help, just ask.
9. Prototyping. Get your idea into prototyping as soon as possible. I am talking about 2nd week at the absolute latest. Therefore, use local parts for prototyping. It usually translates to extra cost, but it's better that pulling your hair waiting for parts to arrive for 3-4 weeks to start on prototyping.

I have a feeling I am forgetting something that I wanted to mention. Oh well, it will come to me later.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

One tip we have is to start simple. We did a basic design for this years game that would only score in the low goals. It's easy to start simple in your first year and not have to worry about huge ideas that may not work. We just did a simple design that would score in the low goals and we even made it to the world championships.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

Haha, this year was my teams rookie year, and the largest issue 2nd largest issue we ran into was spending 2+ weeks on designing the robot. We wanted to design the most efficient one we could, in the the end we got one that could pass, pickup, shot high and low goal, and shoot over the truss effortlessly, We later found out only 1 other team had the similar shooting conept we did xD, it was great ! :D

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

After 2 years competing in FRC I am left with a lot of "we should haves".

The number one thing I will put forth is get your funding in order. It seems that teams in my area that are attached to the schools that they represent do not go out and get more funding. Public Schools do not have the funding to put forward a top tier team every year (The Charter and Private schools 'get it' straight-away and go after private funding). Once a Public School adopts a program, pays for the registration, the coaching, etc - it is already $15,000 into the program. They see no incentive to put more into the team. GET CORPORATE SPONSORS!

The second item is to create a strong drive train. If you have a strong drive train heading into the season, you are miles ahead of most teams competing at your regional (unless you are in Michigan or the Toronto area). We were a step away from including a Butterfly drive for this year - but we missed the mark (because we were trying to do too much).

We did well over the last two years - with terrible drives. We are now in the midst of perfecting our "BeckerFly" drive as well as a tank drive using the 3Cim Ball Shifter. We will be completing these two over the next couple of weeks.

Which leads me to my final point - get your team active in the offseason.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

I'm gonna have to disagree with this here. For a vast majority of teams, it's much more beneficial to put your resources into other things besides developing a drivetrain. As a learning excercise, sure, it can be great, but the kitbot is an excellent drivetrain that so many teams, both new and veteran, definitely undervalue.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

I agree, the kitbot is a fine drive - it just so happens that FRC 4607 tried other measures. We went back to the kitbot for our State Tournament bids in 2013 and 2014. We were part of the winning alliance in 2013, and lead the charge for our alliance in 2014 - only losing to the eventual champs that had two teams with much better drives (2175 and 2052).

However, in Minnesota, there are a lot of teams that do kitbot drives - so distinguishing yourself from the pack is difficult if your team does not do the other things right. For some reason, 4607 has found a niche in the game the last two seasons (I give credit to my strategy team and Ginger Power for this).

There are 60+ teams at North Star, and most have kitbot drives. Of these teams, most of the top teams have already competed at another regional and have the nuances of the game figured out. So if you are a kitbot drive new to the game, you are behind the crowd of front-runners.

So yeah, if you want to be a team that has a drive train 'just as good as the rest' - so be it. Good luck in that. I would highly suggest that you look to do something better. I am sure that our insignificant 'kit-bot' drive train was something that 2175 looked at when they did not draft us in the MSHSL Championships (we were #2 after Quals) - and why they chose 2052 (the #6 team after quals).

There is a reason that 2175 and 2052 have been the top teams in Minnesota the last two years (Both have won multiple Regionals, made it to the Elims in their respective fields at CMP, and have been state champs the last two years). Both have drives that are light-years beyond the kitbot.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

I don't think teams decide "nah, we don't need more money. we'll do with what we have". It's just not as easy as it sounds. In our rookie year our efforts were not enough to score any real sponsors.

I would have to disagree about the drive train. Rookie year difficult enough as it is, to add another challenge of building own drive train. We were small team of 9 kids and 5-6 mentors with budget of less than $15,000. There is no way we could do a specialized drive train and if we would attempted it, we would not make it to compete at all. In fact, there were only 2 teams competed from 4 teams registered this year in our city (population over 800K), so challenges are many and there is no need to add another one to replace something that works.
I mean, yeah, if you are large rookie team with several veteran mentors, high budget etc. you may have a lot more options. If sky is the limit, for example, you can build 6 robots with different drive trains different shooters, have you own in-team competition to select best bot with best drive team etc.
However, I think it's far from reality for most rookie teams.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

We were just having this discussion--what made the difference for 1678 this year. We joked about how bad our catapult was this year, but we agreed the fact that we may have had fastest West Coast drive was a big difference maker for us on the the robot. (There were many non-robot factors that were just as important.)

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

We give a rules test on the first day to EVERY team member and they must pass before they can work on the robot.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

I wasn't disagreeing with the fact that better drivetrain will be better for the competition. What I was disagreeing with is giving advice to rookie team to build a better drivetrain. For all around rookie team learning curve is tremendous and I do not see how drivetrain can be anywhere near the top of the importance list.

Keep in mind, I started this post as a FRC required feedback from rookie team that receive FRC sponsorship. So the feedback is primarily for rookie teams to learn from our experience and may be it will help them to focus better on important stuff first.

In conclusion, I just wanted to say that, some advices "have to do" and others are "would be nice to do". Also, some advices will change depending on various factors (i.e. size of the team, students and mentors skillset, budget, access to manufacturing facilities etc).
Honestly I do not see any realistic way for us to be able to build a different drivetrain in our rookie year. Considering we were small team (9 kids), one of only active 2 rookie teams, no local veteran teams to get support from, very low budget, no access to decent shop - working in a chem lab with only couple drills, mitre saw and drill press.

So, I suppose, what I was writing is the information that would greatly benefit our own team if we knew it in December.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

I am missing something. How do you test rules on the first day, when the rules are released at the kick off?

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

A robot's drivetrain is always the most important thing. The second most important thing is the drivetrain, and so is the third.

I don't think the advice was intended to suggest that rookies should put a lot of engineering effort into developing a fancy drivetrain. It's just that the kit drivebase shouldn't be treated as a "black box" that gets handed to teams as an unquestioned given. It should be studied and understood, and there should be actual analysis applied to decisions about the frame dimensions, the size of the wheels, potential alternate gearboxes, etc.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

The belt driven kitbots that have been available for the last two years have been the best drivetrains our team has ever had. For most teams especially rookies, I would definitely stick to the kit-bot chassis with maybe a gearbox change to two speed depending on the game. Having the drive train built and running during week 1 is the reason why we've been using it every year. It gives us a lot more time to focus on our manipulators which are really the key element to playing most games very well. An average drivetrain with an awesome manipulator and scoring device is better than an awesome drivetrain and average manipulator and scoring device in my opinion. Honestly too, the kit bot and vex alternative are above average anyways.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

I speed-read the rules, then quickly created a test by 1pm (West Coast). It seemed to work pretty well for us.

Re: Rookie Season 2014 - Lessons Learned
 

WOW, you guys! way too organized!!!! :)