Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

5586 is a second-year team that made a practice bot this year. I'm not sure if I'd call us successful* team yet, but I'm here at CD trying to just that. ::safety::

*although we did make to worlds last season based on a rookie all star award

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

Team 1991 has for this year. Last year we attempted, but due to snow and school closings, it was only a swerve drive train with nothing else. However, this year we built a practice bot parallel to our competition bot. This allowed us to only make mistakes once.
Wiring them in parallel was the biggest help, especially with this being our team's first year with Java. The programmers didn't have to worry about differences.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

Team 2855 was close to building a practice robot this year, we got a second control system and set up a dummy board to practice programming on. We actually had two boards that were each used to program the robot in separate languages (LabVIEW and Java). This year was a transition year for us. We eventually used Java for the final robot but we kept the LabVIEW team (one senior) programming just in case.

This year has been our best year statistically since our rookie year. Also, this is the first year we've been active on CD.*
And, we won the Entrepreneurship Award this year**.

*Coincidence?

**We also have a random medal from 2009 that we have no idea how we got

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

Both this year and last year we built practice bots, but nothing really came of it. This year, we spent a lot of time on working on a climber, but nothing came of it (as you saw at Tech Valley). We also worked on attempting vision, and we got half of the system working, but not aiming and firing correctly. (That green ring is just a decoy.) This year, our practice bot was mainly used to get our code working sufficiently to even drive and shoot.

We fixed a lot of issues on our practice bot and spent practice day of our first regional adjusting our main bot with those fixes.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

2667 built a practice robot this season. It was finished with just enough time to remove our shooter to put on our competition robot for North Star. Our primary issue was that the robots were built in sequence instead of in parallel, and our process was drawn out too long during build season. We're hoping to transition to building two robots in parallel during the build season next year.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

tl;dr

The key to winning a competition is a capable robot and capable drivers.

Robots are capable when the design and fabrication processes used are good (arguably).

Drivers are capable when they have enough experience driving (altough some are naturally better than others). If your drivers show up at competition with less than about 20 hours of driving experience, you are at a disadvantage. If they have 100 hours, they can make up for a lot of 'bad' in a robot.

So, between bag day and competiton, what's your drve team doing? Sitting on their hands, or driving your practice robot?

I would be interested in knowing if any team that did not build a second robot has ever made it to Einstein. I'd be surprised if the number was much greater than zero.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

I think 610 is known for not building a practice robot? Was this the case when they won in 2013?

Given that 32 teams make Einstein now, I'd guess there are at least a few, if not more, that have made it to the big show with no practice robot.

-Mike

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

That is correct. They still do not build one.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

Does this include second and third picks? Because then I'd bet that number is a bit higher than zero.

Also poll results show the bias of active teams on CD vs the general FIRST population, because I wouldn't believe this percentage of teams across all of FIRST builds 2 bots.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

In 2015 we built two robots in sequence, but they were completed within a close timeframe of each other. We did not really decide which robot we would bag until the last week or two of build season.

This season we decided to not build a complete practise bot but pretty much possess an entire second robot+more in spares/parts. We spent a lot of time fine tuning our shooting mechanism during the build-season which used up a lot of CNC time, we built 3 different shooter designs with around 5 shooters built in total We mounted our shooter on a test bed which was the same dimensions as our chassis, to help our driver practise line the turret up for shots and also to help test and fine tune our vision tracking.

We are planning to build a practise robot next year.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

While lots of people seem to believe a practice bot is essential, we won our state championship (Michigan), and our division at champs last year (Carson), and we have never built an in-season practice bot.

We quite frankly don't have the budget for this, it's pushing our budget just to build one robot. We reuse and reduce when it comes to parts, and sometimes that causes us to end up with some sub-par bits and pieces, but we make it work.

Champs isn't just for the teams who have the money to build a practice bot, or who have large sponsors willing to offer up major time, money and facilities. All of our sponsors are local companies--a lot of local machine shops, and the businesses of parents from our team. We live in a small town, we don't have access to a major machining or working facility.

But, we do take pride in what we have. We have great partnerships with local people and companies, who helped chip in when we short of the money needed to go to champs last year. We have a good relationship with our community, we host a district competition here, and work to expose kids in our community to robotics and STEM. We are lucky to have access to a great local machine shop that lets us use their laser cutter and welder so that we can gain experience with custom fabrication.

So we're a team that took mecanums to Einstein...and we're practice-bot-less.

I think we're doing just fine.

If you're a team that can't build a practice bot for financial or other reasons, don't let it get you down. Anyone can make it to the top :)

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

We planned on making a second robot but we couldn't afford a second pair of sonic shifters so we ended up making a lessons learned robot. Basically we transferred our drive train and electrical components from our lessons learned robot to our competition robot once we made all of the changes that were necessary.

- Connor

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

I would be curious how many teams made practice bots in the top 50 of Zondaq's FRC Championship History. http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/3133

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

Ya, we generally don't build a practice bot (as was the case in 2013), mainly due to the effort in manually machining two full robots. Needless to say, not having a practice bot has been annoying at times, but it certainly doesn't stop us from iterating and improving.

I will say that having a practice bot is really nice for testing and flushing out designs to see the weaknesses. We had to rush finishing our bot in 4 weeks so we could had the remaining 2 as practice/time to break the bot and improve designs.

We did make 2 bots in 2010 and just ran into a bunch of issues. Whenever we were making new autos, we found that whatever we did on the practice bot always required a lot of work to get working on the real bot (probably due our feedback integration). Additionally, we make lots of changes here and there on our real bot and it's really annoying to do that twice to truly have an identical replica. We still found the biggest issue was actually making two bots. It took us a week and a half to fully machine out bot this year, it's just unreasonable for us to spend a solid 3 or so weeks machining parts...

This year, we designed the backbone (the superstructure of the robot and the claw) of our robot to be easily removed (and lucky it was under 30lbs ;) ). This lets us do maintenance and upgrades of our bot without having to make a practice bot. If you look at our robot between GTRC and ONWA, we managed to get our high goal shooting nailed down (pretty huge change in performance) by working on the real claw for our bot. Kind of a nice balance between making a practice bot and not.

Tldr: We don't build a practice bot because it takes too long to machine for a replica that never is truly accurate to the real thing. Instead, we built our bot to be modular so we can iterate on certain parts within the withholding allowance.

Re: Did you make a second robot? [POLL]
 

Count us among teams that build two non-identical robots. the first one had a few dimension and construction issues, and we've built 3-4 complete shooter assemblies by now between pre-bag and various withholding allowances.

The second bot was made better, and used what we learned on the first, but they are similar enough that the code transfers with few modifications between them. Electronics mounting is another story, and the practice robot only has a front bumper because our intake requires one.