[Michael Hill]

Make sure you work with your mechanical design team to ensure good placement of electronic components. You may have to be assertive with them that your roborio or pdp shouldn't be buried and inaccessible, but be prepared to be overruled.

As for doing a schematic...yeah, you can, but in general, it will change very little between this year and next year. It may be better to study the schematic given by FIRST and make sure you understand it. You don't have to wait until build season to learn how everything connects together and operates. During the season, your time may be better spent helping to get prototypes operating with motors with a motor controller (you're kidding yourself if you think hooking a motor up to a battery is going to represent a real controlled system). Once prototypes are hooked up, work with the design people to work on component placement, then after you get stuff being built up, go ahead and lead the effort on wiring.

Think of things that would help you out during a competition. When you're trying to debug something, it's much better to have labeled wires than to try to trace a wire back to the source. Additionally, a lot of people may forget about it, but make sure your batteries are being taken care of. That means not overusing one battery over another. The goal is consistency. If you continually use and abuse one battery, eventually, your robot will perform differently with that battery than another battery (which can lead to unexpected voltage drops when loaded and can result in slow shooter speeds, stalled motors, etc.).