[nixiebunny]

I see Bag n Tag as a good thing, to focus the teams on getting the design/build process complete in six weeks.

Our team built a practice drive base in December so that we'd have some experience driving it and be able to test ideas. As it turns out, it is not entirely compatible with our real robot design. Nonetheless, we're going to modify it to support our withheld shooter mechanism (15 lbs) and run it with our withheld cRIO and Talons to improve our score before our week 4 regional.

We still worked up till midnight Tuesday to get the real drive base in the bag.

We are on a very low budget, but we did spend a couple hundred dollars to save us having to tear apart the gearboxes on the real bot to borrow the CIMs and encoders for the practice bot. That would have wasted a couple hours of our practice day.

As for the problem of not having time with family, our entire family is on the team and we're doing the after-season upgrading/testing in our house, so no big deal there.