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Originally Posted by GlennGraham
Thanks for bringing this up. In FLL, all the teams I have seen have access to a playfield for practice during the development season (low cost and small size). It really lends itself to the iterative nature of LEGO robot design. For Vex (do to larger cost and size of the playfields), do most teams build a mock-ups of some of the field elements and practice with them "piece meal"? Build full playing fields? Have a shared, community playfield that everyone can schedule time on? Can anyone share their experiences with any of these options (or others)?
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Also, you can constuct a majority of the field with wood and other common materials from your local home improvement or hardware store. This year we built a quarter-field, and the only piece we bought from Vexlabs was the auto loader (the rest we made from plywood and foam matting). This was also the size of the divided autonomous field for this year's game, so it allowed us to test our auto modes, and do some driver training for the operator controlled matches.
Also, even though it still takes significantly longer to build and rebuild robot features and systems, it is still significantly easier than it will be if the students go on to FRC, and it is quite feasable to rebuild and redesign features during the season, or even in a krunch, at competition. We have typically found a mix between general designing and trial and error. We first create a general design concept of how we want to play the game, what mechanisms we can use to acheive that, and can we build the mechanisms (do we have enough motors, are they too complex, do we have the parts, and are they too big?). After that we come up with some simple drawings, but we often leave specific gear ratios and lengths up for trial and error, identifying which ratios and sizes work best for each situation. Thus we go with fairly easy to repair and rebuild designs. This also leads to a longer build period, but it helps us acheive the most from our design. We spent several hours during one weekend working on our "shoulder" design this year trying different gear and sproket ratios until we found one that could lift our arm in a reasonable amount of time. It all depends on how much time your team has to build and test before your competition.