Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto
We are going to build three robots (1 comp and 2 practice) for 2016.
Why?
The competition season is longer than the build season.
We will do more development and iteration during the competition season than the build season.
We want two robots to iterate faster during the competition season.
I think its clear that the gap is wide between us and low resource teams because we have the money to buy 3x of robot parts, and get to play with two robots post-stop build, and low resource teams get to play with zero robots post-stop build.
You make the call if the gap shrinks when low-resource teams get to play with their one and only robot while we're playing with our two or three robots.
We meet 4 days a week.
-Mike
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This, I think, is the crucial point right here.
And I hear the people who are talking about burnout. I am very nearly burned-out myself at this point, having invested far more of myself in FRC over these past few years than was at all wise for a college student (in fact, I am still deciding to what extent I will be involved this coming season, even though I will have graduated by then - I do not think it would be healthy for me to repeat what I've been doing). But a six-week build season did not make the burnout any less bad, because as has been noted, work never really stops after the robot is in the bag.
In 2014, I spent the entirety of my spring break scrambling to hobble together a practice bot so that we could debug and drive test a design that was put in the bag without ever having actually run. Sure, this was a "choice" - but the "choice" was between this and a guaranteed flop at our first regional. How many mentors do you know who'd have chosen the latter? And the fact is, we
barely got that practice bot together, at rather huge out-of-pocket cost to some of our students' parents, to boot. The cost to our team from not having access to our robot after bag day was
massive.
I do not think this is a cost that is equal across teams of wildly varying resources, and for that reason I think the bag day should go.