[KenWittlief]

something our team did this year that really helped out with auton mode is we built a pratice robot before the kickoff meeting, using the 2x4 alum frames and 3/8 plywood base, and the stock FIRST transmissions and drill motors from last year (with old RCs from previous machines)

this allowed our students to build something that ran around on the floor before the kickoff, so they got some confidence in their abilities

and it lets students pratice driving something

and it let us mount a gyro sensor and contact switches and play with the IR sensors in the first few weeks of the program - so we had the basis of our auton mode working on our practice bot (named Frank BTW)

switching it over to the real machine is not hard now, we do have to translate from Pbasic to C - but we are confident that our approach is solid and wont take too much tweaking on KG1 (our real bot for this year: KateGleasonOne)

I keep threating to post photos of Frank on here - I will get to it - maybe tonight (I dont have a digital camera, it 'dissapeared' when my daughter went off to college - I wonder where it could be?!)