Some really good suggestions here. I'm taking notes.
The practice robot thing was one of the biggest takeaways I had from last year, and it served us really well this year to have one. *But* if I can rant a bit, the fact that you need one to be competitive is quite frankly unfair.
FIRST set the bag rules (and crate rules previously) to put some kind of cap on the labour teams sunk into their bots. This is good for the sanity of the mentors, and was a noble attempt at leveling the playing field. Unfortunately it back fired on both counts. Now *all* successful teams build two robots so they can continue practicing and developing into the competition season. That puts a doubly high cost barrier between rookie and poorer teams and ever being competitive. Everyone knows this is unfair (not to mention a complete waste of resources), but the image of "stop build day" is so compelling that no one is willing to acknowledge the problem.
As far as I'm concerned, we should stop the expensive farce and get rid of the bag rules. Changing the marketing literature build a robot in 7 weeks, or 8 weeks or 10 weeks is just as impressive as 6. End of rant and derail
edit:
Quote:
Originally Posted by cxcad
You don't have to make two full robots to get practice. This year my team decided at the last minute that we really needed practice and debugging time, so we built a second identical chassis to practice on. We just mounted our with holding allowance on it.
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We did the same, and that's good advice. We were lucky to have old drive base parts donated to us by 4039 and 2056 for the job and it certainly saved us money to withhold our elevator for the practice bot. The rest of our mechanisms weighed more than 30 lb so we still had to (pointlessly in the big picture) build a lot of stuff twice.