Re: If you could Breakaway all over again...
 

Use rollers, which were almost nonexistant at BAE.

Re: If you could Breakaway all over again...
 

For our rookie year, we made a great robot that got us top seed and into the semi-finals. The main change I would have made is more scouting, of which we had done almost none of, which meant we picked less than ideal team members. This year, we had a lot better scouting system, but missed the ball on a lot of the things we had done right last year (the big one being getting in practice time before the competition).

Re: If you could Breakaway all over again...
 

Didn't think I'd see this thread resurrected...

But anyway... Now that I've been through another build season, I think I can take another look at how we should have done things that year. My conclusion, we had some good ideas but what really killed us was the complete failure of thinking things through and exploring every option (Funnily enough we made the same mistake this year concerning some things, those weren't crippling though like the ones we made in 2010...) and then FOCUSING on what was absolutely essential (we failed again here too, we did better before losing focus though).

EDIT: Anyone have any ideas to help keep these problems to a minimum (besides just talking about it and trying hard not to do so)?

Re: If you could Breakaway all over again...
 

I think a big problem that teams have is that they think they have 6 weeks of build time, then some programming after build season before competition. I think that in order to make a successful robot, it needs to be more along the lines of 1 week desgin, 2 weeks build, 1 week program, and the remaining 2 weeks for practice and tweaking. If we had done the amount of work we did on our robot during the regional the week before the end of build season, we would have had a much better robot. There were a lot of problems this year that could have been fixed with some quick testing (such as autonomous), but we never had any hands on time with the robot till the competition.

Re: If you could Breakaway all over again...
 

Oh, we set out a time line somewhat like that before the season but we fell behind. While it is a helpful tool for setting out goals, it didn't really help out in the implementation.