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Originally Posted by Ken Patton
We brought our mostly-assembled practice robot to GLR. It sat in my truck. On multiple occasions we went out to the truck and "harvested" parts from the spare robot. In every single instance the parts we used were (1)fabricated before the ship date or were off-the-shelf components, and (2)used only after they were fully disassembled down to individual pieces.
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I don't see how this can be considered to be "ok", and here is why:
When the six weeks is drawing to a close, noone (at least noone that has the resources, planning, and skill to make a practice robot) is doing any serious design. The last week or so is tweaking time. It's time to lighten your robot, it's time to add that extra loop of string or extra bolt, or extra timing correction in your code. For team 118, it's the time for the drivers to practice running the robot to death, and when it dies,
we fix it. Sometimes the fix is something simple and sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, after fixing something for the umpteenth time, we come across the design flaw that's causing the thing to fail in the fist place, so we fix that. This is what engineers do when we see something broke - we fix it.
My point is, six weeks is not long enough for a team to "finish" their robot. We ship a robot because it's due, not because we can't think of anything more to do to it. When a team has a robot for an extra month after the ship date, there is no way to avoid putting on that extra bolt or weld or hole that will make it more perfect. Is that team drastically changing their design? No. But they are changing it. If the six weeks is not the time period for changing the robot, then what is it?
All that said, I see nothing wrong with doing
any of this, as long as the practice robot, and all of its parts, stays back home in the shop. Once you bring that robot, or any piece of it (assembled or not), to a competition, you are competing with a machine that was modified outside of the two allowable times you can work on it: during the six week build, or during a competition.
The bottom line is that a part can either be part of a practice robot, or a spare, but not both. Ship the spares to the competition, practice with your practice robot, and show up on Thursday with your tools, your raw materials and OTS parts, and a smile.