The Nu-trons, a 7th year veteran team finished 49th out of 51 with at least 75% of rookies doing better than us. We had no downtime, every single minute the robot was in the pits we were repairing design problems. To illustrate how bad it was: I'm one of the programmers, I had to implement new feature in the software. I had less than 10 minutes to do this between matches.
Here's my major issue: it was against the rules to take parts off site. We would have killed to take some parts back to our lab in Boston and work on them so we wouldn't have the problems we did. The other issue would be at what time you did this. Since, the machine shop closed early.
The machine shop at BAE could do almost anything, they even let us borrow drill bits. The guys did a lot of work for us and for that we are extremely grateful. However, the schedule claimed the machine shop was open to 5pm Saturday. At 3pm, they told us they were closing shop. They said, "Come un are you going to give us crap? We worked all day for you. Some competition sites don't even have a machine shop." With the new rule stating you can't build parts after a competition, everything has to be done on site, we were extremely dissapointed. Needless to say, not everything got fixed. I hope Annapolis has a machine shop
