[Jeff Waegelin]

Originally Posted by KenWittlief

Ive found its really hard to get any meaningfull pratice with last years, or a previous years robot

for one thing, they often have a very short 'mean-time between failure' rate - you drive it for 10 minutes then spend an hour fixing something

it would be better to take the RC and build a simple practice bot - something with a basic 2 wheel drivetrain and simple frame, that will run on one battery for an hour or more, and wont load up the motors so they cook in 4 minutes.

search on 'practice' and maybe 'frank' and the one we made this year should show up in here somewhere, with photos

That's interesting. We still run our 2002 robot for practice, and we've only had one problem (old firmware on the controller that didn't like autonomous mode) in all the time we've used it for testing. That robot just doesn't quit. We've run it through 4 competitions in 2002, several weeks of autonomous testing in 2003, and countless demos at local schools all without a hitch. It's probably the most solid, reliable machine we've ever built. I guess it all depends on the robot, and how reliable and robustly it was built.