This year was kind of hard for my team because during the summer our main sponsor Cordis decided to stopped funding us and find a new school. We had to run around and pull enough money together to enter regionals, nationals, and build a robot.
We also got lucky and found the Knottsco
www.knottsco.com (You can see a picture of our robot here with our second place trophy :-) which was willing to give us all the 80/20 and pneumatics we could use and Thermoplastic Processes which loaned us the use of their machine shop.
Another effect of that was the total lack of engineers - machinists. We had one physics teacher, one electronics teacher, and one machinist who assisted us. I'm proud to say however that our robot was designed and built 95% by students on manual machines. You will not see an engineer working on the robot in the pits because there are none. I do not get annoyed when I see robots that are clearly built by professionals because it gives me all the more satisfaction when i go up against those bots and i show that I can do just as well if not better.