[EricH]

I do think that the "middle of the road" option is actually going to be the best one here.

And that's the one Jim has proposed: Weekly unbag time.

Anybody else remember the FIX-IT Windows, back about 10 years? Same concept, only with robot access.

For anybody who wasn't around at the time... There were three classes of material that could be brought in. Spare, Upgrade, Raw Material. Spare was identical replacements. Raw Material, well, you can figure that one out (included COTS). Upgrade was either improved functionality in a Spare or a whole new system, or both. Long and the short of it was that Upgrades had to be built during your FIW time--the first year of that, it was one 6-hour window, IIRC, but after that it was up to two with neither shorter than 2 hours. Something along those lines. Spare... Not sure if that was buildable outside the window. Oh, and the other annoying item was that you pretty much got one per event, if memory serves.


Now, let's see what happens if you stick the robot in the bag at the 45-day mark, and then once per competition week* you get to pull it out for up to X hours.

--Access for measuring
--Access for driver practice
--Access for programming
--Access to install that one item that just didn't quite make it into the bag...

And whaddayaknow, the district areas already do this (instead of a full practice day). So you can't say that that's a total unknown. Matter of fact, it's a known.

The real catch is that teams that don't want to open the bag can simply tell their members that "we're not going to use this time this week, go get some more sleep and catch up on homework".


*I'm not going to go into whether that's "week before your competition", AKA 1/event, or "week before any competition", AKA 1/week. Doesn't really matter for pure speculation.