Re: If you could change one thing....
 

Nothing.
We had a GREAT season. Best robot I've ever had the pleasure of working on. Most student involvement of ANY year I've been in FIRST. GREAT group of kids -- incredible group dynamic. Plenty of support from "home" and "significant other" (even when I'm grumpy and stressed) which makes the build WAY more fun. We were able to help several of our "friend" teams, which is nice. We helped out some rookie teams, which was VERY fulfilling.

Overall, we just grew as individuals, and as a team. I just can't stop myself from babbling about how happy I am. Everything just started falling into place. This season is definitely a high note for me.

Many Kudos to Clarkson Junior, former X-Cat, and team leader extrordinaire Adrienne Emerson for running such a tight ship. Ader - you're WAY better at this than I was.

Let's hope the "good feelings" stay with us through regionals... ;)

John
*knocks on wood*

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

oh wow i'm sorry.... floods are not cool...


if i could change anything... i wish i hadn't spent so much time practing to be driver (which i didnt make btw...:() and instead spent more time designing and building the actual robot. There is a lot about robot building i dont know, and i regret really missing out on a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot.

but other than that, i am so pleased with how everything turned out. we got the chairman's award submission finished early and we even had the luxury of sort of taking our time with it (better than last year... we literally pieced together the whole thing in 7 hours at my house about 3 days before it was due... not cool), overall, the Website has improved exponentially, Roccobot 2k5 looks awesome... (sorry we still haven't posted a *finished* product... be patient, its coming soon, i promise! :)) and we just got a lot done!



:) I guess instead of focusing on the stuff we wish we could have changed, we should focus on all of the wonderful stuff we accomplished instead! instead of saying "ugh, i wish this hadnt broken" or "why did the weather have to go funky like that and mess us up", why not say "wow! i cant believe that even though that really important part broke, we still managed to fix it!" or "dispite that horrible weather we've been having, we managed to actually finish the robot in due time! and even if things look their gloomies and their worst, and everything went wrong, you can at least say, "hey, at least we tried, and we learned a lot from this experience!"

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

Well I think I would have liked to have everything mesh better the gearboxes at best were jerry rigged only thing holding the shafts in was the setscrew on the gear which was held in by the spacers between bearings and the gear. Plus I think we decided the 1/2" steel rod that rotates for our arm is bent a little. It didn't shear through the aluminum 4"x4" tube? Well thats it.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I'd skip getting pneumonia and spending 12 days of last two weeks of the build in the hospital. Kind of shot a big hole in the build schedule.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

In a few instances, there were dicisions made as to the design of my team's robot that were not carefully considered. The best features seem to be the ones whose design was vehemently discussed between students and between mentors. On the other hand, the parts that needed work or failed were most often ones that were not aggressively debated.
I think much grief with design problems could have been avoided by working with more people reviewing ideas and by _paying attention to detail_.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I'd have tried a bit harder to avoid getting fired from my job because of the late nights spent working at the lab -- only a tiny bit harder, though.

Am I the first person to become unemployed because of dedication to FIRST?

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

For us, it was a few things. I wish we had spent less time brainstorming and arguing about ideas and actually get a design and build it. I also wish that we had more time to redesign our grabbing device after we discovered that the claw we had made did not work effectively. And finally, I wish the team had given the programmers and I more time with the camera and not even really try to use it. It was still a fun season though.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I wish that we were able to get more sponsers. Each member on our team has to pay their way to each compition, thats not cool at all.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I have also lost my job as well. But it's not like i miss it or anything. This is much better work, even though we arnt getting "payed" now we will in the long run!!

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I wish we could have done something witha little pizzaz! I mean some of the new engineers and even 2 old, kept telling he kids to think simple and basic. Btu that isnt relaly how we run we always do something that makes us stand out in some way or another even if we dont' work. But this year, looking at all the other robot pictures I have seen, we will probably blend in with most others. With this being my senior year I just wish we oculd have done something special just to keep in memorable rather then the basic telescoping arm with virtually a hook and a non-shift transmission. It is just so mundane, I wanted to make something that jumped out at you and caught your eye. Instead on the picture we have uploaded the most comments we gotwere for our battery mount... :confused:

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I really wish we had more time debugging code. We really haven't tested out autonomous yet because the robot wasn't built until about 4 or 5 days before ship date.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

It seems I agree with the most of you...

Our chassis seemed to be finished at about the time our ROBOT was finished last year... this created a slew of problems. Though our robot is working well, we were still drilling to get underweight twenty minutes before fed-ex came.

Too must brainstorming, not enough efficiency and building.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I wish I had had the discipline to keep my hands off the keyboard and teach more students about the programming. I couldn't get confident enough in my abilities to explain things well enough for someone else to implement what we needed to have done in the available time.

We do have a project planned using the mini-RC to run a motorized cart with funky steering. For that I will act only as a resource and have the students do absolutely all the coding.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

I would change the fact that we had finals the next week after kick-off. It's not exactly convenient when you feel the sudden urge to draw a potential robot design on your Biology Final. Also, transportation seemed to be difficult this year, we couldn't quite get people to stay late. Those are just some minor problems - as far as building goes, I wouldn't change anything.

Re: If you could change one thing....
 

Of course, there is always some wish that everything had gone smoothly and perfectly, but in the long run, I think overcoming obstacles together builds a stronger team. Sometimes lessons learned the hard way are the best lessons learned.

I do wish I could have changed the amount of stress and frustration everyone went through, especially our animation team (I'm not going to go into their nightmare). I like everyone to be happy, and it bothers me to see people upset, which is kind of hard to avoid during the crazy six weeks of build.

Heidi