[nobrakes8]

Our team has the FLL come to the high school and do stuff in the same rooms we built the FRC robots. We host a FLL invitational in August at our town fair and I think they have like 24 or 25 teams usually show up.

We'll also be attending some off season events and doing work to raise money for abused children.

This summer I'm guessing we're going to do some new chasis ideas and fool around with different ideas. This year's chasis and gearbox was pretty good, but I'm guessing they're going to practice other deisgns, that way in January they could decide on a good base chasis and get right to work like we did this year with the KOP one (this is the first time the 1071 advisors could remember between their years on GUS and MAX that they had a chasis, gearbox, and electronics on a working robot 3 days after kick off).

Reasons why 1-4yr teams should do R&D during the summer (or doing drastic R&D in the off season events like team MAX) and the performance difference it made to my team:

2003 - we tipped every other match. (note - 2004 and 2005 we needed A LOT of help to tip)

2004 - we couldn't lock the arm to stay on the bar (note - 2005 how we came up with the ratchet design and our arm locks into place... not mention the reason why we became 2005 UTC regional champions).. We also have better ideas and theories we didn't test about how to climb step easier than what we did in 2004.

2005 - slow for the third year in a row and our "gripping" system of the arm had flaws (guess what team in 2006 won't be slow and will have hopefully a flawless gripping system on the arm?)