[Siri]

Did we design/plan in advance?
Yes and no. We had some bells and whistles planned that didn't get done by Stop Build, some of which we worked in the withholding allowance, some of which we bagged. We also had several changes that were not planned beforehand.

(How) Did we leave space?
Yes, though "leaving space" is probably not a term I could apply to anything we did on a 28x28x28" robot. We work on modularity overall (see below), and try to estimate what we might want to change and how we could best do it. Keeping weight down is definitely a goal for this reason, though it's not always successful.

Practice bot?
Yes, and we wouldn't have even attempted to climb without it.

Does it work seamlessly, or is there tweaking?
Between both. Some go on without a hitch, others are a constant pain, tweaking throughout the event. (Or the next event. Or Einstein.)


What else do you do?
Be modular, have a practice bot, CAD everything. We try to think hard about what we're really going to change and how to make it simple:

2013
- Swerve modules switch in 5 minutes (4 bolts and 5 wires)
- Swerve steering motors in maybe 10 minutes
- Entire shooter comes off with 3 bolts (ok, 2 wires, 2 hoses and a quick release pin)
- Shooter strut is entirely adjustable and can come off with another 3 bolts (of course, it does have the PDU on it...oops)
- Climb wheels switch in under 10 minutes, though that's basically the only quick thing about the climb
- Arm, which we iterated a bunch of times and eventually tabled entirely, came on and off by punching out a single (very tight) axle

2011
- swerve modules switch in 10 minutes
- claw switched in something like 10 minutes; - arm came off with 4? bolts
- minibot deployment was very modular and quick, 2-10 minutes for different things
- minibot of course came off--got iterated a lot

Note I missed 2012, in which basically only our swerve modules were modular. You'll note that by some odd coincidence, we won for our minibot and DT in 2011 (reasonable worlds performance for our claw). In 2013, we won for our drivetrain and shooter (some for the climb). In 2012 we won solely on our DT. None of these things were working at our first event as well as they were working at the last event we won. Weird happenstance, huh?