Quote:
Originally Posted by Alpha Beta
I love the things I hear about the district system, and the EWCP podcast with Jim Zondag was fantastic. One question about the system. During the unbagging window (which was meant to repleace the Thursday time at a traditional regional) is there a limit to how much you can change on the robot? In other words can a team bag a minimal robot, continue to work on a practice bot, and then swap the two during the unbagging window?
At a regional you are limited to 30 lbs of custom parts, which is a number I wouldn't mind seeing reduced. At the same time I wish we would all go to a district like system. Just curious how it works on the other side of the fence.
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As far as I know, there is no limit to the amount of work that can be done other than the amount of time your robot can be out of the bag. We walked into Philadelphia last year with 20lbs or so of upgrade parts and rebuild our arm, claw and minibot deployment in about 8 hours - so a substantial rebuild is possible in a relatively short amount of time.
That being said, it took us a good portion of Friday to work out all of the kinks of the new system, so it may have hurt us a bit. A team rebuilding their robot during an unbag window could run into the same issues if proper time isn't left for integration. So yes, you could swap parts from a practice robot to a competition bot in a pinch, but the real question to ask yourself is how smoothly will the system integration go? Two robots, even 'identical' ones will have their own quirks and require their own tuning to reach maximum efficiency. (Manufacturing Tolerances, Differences in weight, Differences between new and used parts, etc contribute to the differences between two 'identical' machines)