[Alex.q]

My 3 years in FIRST have taught me many ways of how not to build a robot.

'09: Instead of belts, we used some sort of fabric for ball collection, ending up with a burned up (globe?) motor.
Lesson 1: make sure you have enough torque
Lesson 2: Do research online of what other teams are building so that your team doesn't have to invent everything themselves.

'09: hopper + small opening + turret = I don't know how many times we were even able to shoot because it was always jammed.

'10: I'm not sure how to say this other than don't use your frame as the stopping point for a extremely strong bungee powered kicker. Especially if you cant replace bent pieces because the frame is welded. (Also, this kicker sent a mentor to the ER after cutting his hand between the "foot" and the frame. Avoid dangerous pinch points if possible)

'10: if you have a piston that resets another mechanism (in our case, the piston pushed the kicker into a gate latch than retracted), keep the piston connected to what ever it is actuating. We made a catch for the end of the piston, but this often turned sideways and hence didn't work.

'11: If you build a swerve drive, make sure you test it in game-like condition. We prototyped in the fall (never truly testing it), and due
to slow turn around time from our manufacturer, the programmers didn't get a lot of time with it. Luckily, the programming and mechanical aspects worked for the most part. Unfortunately, the one optical encoder that told the wheels which direction they were pointing was not high enough quality and returned random values. Result: our drivers never knew which way the robot would move. While we were able to fix this with a better sensor in our second regional, this problem ruined an entire regional for us.