So an example of how I got "burned out" this build season.
My family scheduled a vacation on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of the Stop build week....(not sure how I messed up the dates

).
Anyways...the Satuday before, I NEEDED to have all my work done before I left the shop, because otherwise the robot would have been bagged without a functional shooter.
Myself, some other mentors, and some of our most dedicated students worked from 8am Saturday, until 5am Sunday. Just to make sure we had a mechanically sound shooter, ready for the electrical team to wire.
Now, our robot was no where near completed when it went into the bag. We were probably 60% wired (cRIO, Victors wired, a few motors wired) and 70% mechanically complete (drivetrain and shooter complete, no climber, other misc stuff not completed) ....and 0% tested. Our fault, obviously for many, many reasons.
So now our robot is sitting in a bag for 3 weeks not completed, while we continued to work on our practice bot trying to get the climber working. The stop build didn't stop us from working, it just stopped us from working on our competition bot.
When we were allowed to un-bag the week of Waterford, we worked for 3 days (2-3hrs/day...or whatever it was) to get the robot capable of shooting and hanging for 10pts. We had to fight through mechanical, wiring, and software issues that were different than the practice bot.
By the time we showed up at Waterford, it felt like we had been working for a year straight to get this machine functional....and it was really only 70% functional at that point. No pre-programmed positions. Could only FCS at the 2pt goal. Auto was a mess. No climber. Very little driver practice.
This are all 100% self induced issues with biting off more than we could handle... but, if we had access to the robot for the 3 weeks prior, we probably would have been able to get it all working in that amount of time, with the same effort that we already put in.
We then continued to work the same schedule moving towards Troy, MSC, and Champs.
How inspirational was our robot at Waterford compared to the one that we showed at in St. Louis?? Because we receive a lot more comments and questions about the one at St. Louis, than the one at Waterford.