Quote:
Originally Posted by MrForbes
There are a lot of teams that quit building on bag day, and they show up to the competition with 6 weeks worth of designed and built robot. It appears that most of them are not on CD during the off season, to comment on threads like this.
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I come from a team like this, so perhaps my input might be beneficial to this thread. Team 4301 consists of approximately 5 full-time students, about 10 more who go to meetings at least twice a week, and the physics teacher who has so generously given up his afternoons and weekends to allow the team to function. Our school district policy technically does not allow us to meet for more than an hour a day except on weekends, but we have been able to push it to 1:30 to 2 hours for short bursts when we really need it. We do not CAD or program at the meetings, as these activities can be done independently at home/in class and would not be an efficient use of our limited shop time.
As one could imagine, the real issue we face as a team right now isn't so much funding or manufacturing resources as it is the availability of student labor hours to build the robots. Every year, with approximately 7 people showing up per weekday meeting and 5 on Saturdays, we're lucky to have even the most simple of robots fully bagged by Build Stop. For example, our
2014 robot, despite its complete lack of complexity, was completed in the last few minutes of a 1 hour build meeting on bag and tag day. That's the struggle we deal with every year. Now, the robot itself wasn't actually bad, but one of our biggest impedances stemming from the late completion was that we had zero practice time before our first quals match. As a result, the robot – which relied on precise positioning to catch the ball – only ever caught one ball over the course of the entire tournament because I had no experience driving the machine.
Contrast this to our 2015 year, where
the robot was arguably equally as complex as the previous one: KOP + Mecanum drive, one actuated moving mechanism powered by a single motor. This time, however, we got the thing completed an entire day before build stop. The difference? Well, we made it into the eliminations bracket for the first time in our team history, and as an alliance captain nonetheless. This all, based on our team's post-analysis of the season, stemmed from that single day of driving practice.
So what is my team's position on keeping the 6 week build season? We are entirely in favor of getting rid of it. Even if we decided to enforce an artificial 6 week deadline on build completion, the driving practice alone would enable us to make drastic improvements to our robot performance at tournaments. Beside this, the extra time would allow us to be able to more comfortably design more mechanically complex robots with the confidence that we could actually complete them before the tournament. This makes us able to not only be more competitive at the competitions, but it also allows us to be more attractive to potential sponsors by being able to show them a more polished and functional machine than before. Finally, it would allow all of this to occur on a more relaxed schedule. Everyday meetings would no longer be necessary, and we could actually have one or two days a week as cool down time to reduce the burnout on both the mentor(s) and the full-time student members.
tl;dr: low-resource "kickoff to bag" teams would benefit greatly from the removal of the build stop date, even if the only benefit was that they could have a little bit of practice time they could not have had before.