[MichaelBick]

We've only done minor additions but we did a few things this year to make those as easy as possible to do.

What really helped us this year with additions was adopting a bolt pattern. We really liked 973's #7 drill .5" spacing bolt pattern. There are enough holes to easily find a spot for all additions and the #7 holes allows us to use 10-32 bolts or 3/16" rivets. This gives us a lot of versatility. We use 2"x1" tubing, so we only had the bolt patter on the 1" wide face this year. If we had to do it again we would add a bolt pattern to the 2" wide face too.

This year we bagged a cycler with no intake. Also, we initially had a passive climber. Lastly, the shooter got replaced for champs(to increase rate of fire). We decided to leave a place to attach an intake, and already had gearboxes for it designed and manufactured in case we ended up having time to add one. However, this addition never happened. Going into our first regional, we knew that we wanted to be able to go under the pyramid and and hang after the buzzer, however we didn't have time to replace the passive hanger. It worked fine for us(though we had to be careful or the bumpers would get stuck on the ground), but our bolt pattern allowed us to easily add the active hanger for our second regional. The replacement shooter also mounted onto the bolt pattern. We like to leave weight for additions, but both weight and BOM were not an issue for us this year. BOM was significantly under and our robot only weight 80lbs as of bagging(eventually 90 lbs).

Unfortunately this year we did not have a full practice bot to test our changes on. The lifter never made it onto the practice bot. The weight of the two robots were significantly different, and we were sure it would work anyways. The replacement shooter did make it onto the practice bot, and this helped us a lot in tuning.

We didn't have to tune much this year once we modified the comp bot. The lifter bolted on and worked perfectly. The shooter required a bit of tuning, but bang bang took no time at all to tune. We ended up losing consistency of our shooter later into champs, but I believe this is unrelated.

The last important thing to do to make mechanism go on and off really easily is electrical. This year, we soldered no connections. Instead, we found crimps that slid onto the motor terminals or used powerpoles. This allowed the superstructure and all mechanism to pull off the robot super easily.