[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Adam Freeman

Honestly, I can't really explain it outside of mentor experience. We have an incredible Chief Engineer (Jim Meyer - 13 years in FIRST), who I would argue is the best in all of FIRST.

Many teams have asked how we do it....and we've tried to adapt the principles of many other great teams (148, 1114, etc...).

It's definitely not CAD experience. We do 95% of all our work in 2D AutoCAD.

I doubt it's project management, we rarely finish on time.
Since I've joined the team:

-2005: Competition robot did not drive on carpet until first competition.
-2006: Robot was a disaster. Did not have Jim full time this year.
-2007: Robot was finished 2 weeks early. Good robot. Could have done more, but was weary after 2006.
-2008: Complete design change on the arm prior to first competition.
-2009: Complete re-design during un-bag time before first competition.
-2010: Robot was done early. Added ball-magnet before first competition. Added climber throughout competition season.
-2011: Robot was finished early. Mini-bot development and deployment was finished week of first competition. Terrible code issued at first competition.
-2012: Best machine we have ever built. Robot was done early. No major issues throughout competition season.
-2013: Robot not finished when bagged. Major work to get functional before first competition. Climber developed and added throughout competition season.

So my guess would be mentor experience, attitude, and students. We expect that we will be able to create a World Class competition robot. We instill that expectation in our students. We devote as much time as possible (as mentioned before), given work and family requirements.

The other thing we have is almost instant access to parts and materials. We are very fortunate to have a build facility that we can make virtually any part that we would design for our robot. That allows us the opportunity to make design changes quickly.

I'm not sure I would recommend our design process or project management style to anyone else. It works for us....and we're willing to share it, but I don't think it is the "best" process bt any measure.

Thanks for sharing.
Other than you and Dave, I have never met your other engineers such as Jim who I'd like to meet one day on how you folks build great robots year after year.
I wanted to comment on the bolded paragraph above.
You bring up a good point, which almost never is talked about on CD.
Great elite teams can adjust and make changes quickly IMO.

I think for a small rural school like ours, we have quite a bit of machinery that ranks with the best of them. With 9 mills/lathes, enough space for 4 teams to comfortably build their robots, newly acquired waterjet, etc. we have way more equipment than experts and personnel to run them.
We are way too slow in our design and build process where we try to make up for it by spending a large no. of hours/day during build season.
Amplify that with the cost of travel and spending countless hours raising funds, takes time away from prototyping and other offseason projects.
If our team could ever get more people to help, then perhaps we can take more design chances during crunch time and not burn anybody out.