[mandrews281]

This was the first year we had the resources to build a practice bot and it really helped. We had one electrical panel and one shooter, so those were parts in our 40 lbs "spare parts".

Where it helped was giving the drive team more "behind the wheel" experience and in allowing our programmers to get 5 autonomous routines working (although we only ever used 2, it was nice to have the options) and to fine tune our auto-targeting. We actually didn't get the practice bot working until week 2 of the competition season (our regionals were weeks 3 & 5). We were never an alliance captain (not enough CP), but we were good enough to get picked and were part of the winning Palmetto alliance.

The main downside was our single electrical panel. It had all our Jaguars on it. We use CAN bus and direct connect many sensors to the Jaguars. So we had to have connectors for all the wiring (power and sensors). We had cronic problems with the encoder signals and at Championships we soldered around the connectors for two encoders. One of our off-season projects for electrical is to find better connectors for the sensors.

It takes resources (time and money) to build a second bot; but I would say it was worth it, especially if you attend more than one regional or have some very talented programmers who never seem to get enough time with the completed robot during build season to get the software working.