[KenWittlief]

After giving this some thought, and reading through the posts in this thread again, I take it the general opinion is that FIRST teams can start designing their robot for next year, right after this years championship, if thats what they want to do?

And they can build full up prototypes, and set up CNC machine programs to churn out all the parts they need, and have all the materials ready to feed the machine,

as long as the parts being used are manufactured/fabbed.... after the kickoff meeting?

If that is the case I think FIRST should really strike the word "design" from the rules "after the kickoff"

and replace it with 'fabricate and assemble" because that is what they really mean.

The only risk I see from doing this is that you might 'design' a robot in september that will use motors or other parts that will not be in this years KOP (due to changes), or parts that might not be on the allowable parts list, but based on past experience that risk is very low.

So why dont we stop pretending? Why do some many teams wait until the kickoff to really get started? We can design base frames and drive trains, and accutators, and control systems, and sophisticated sensors with complex electronics, work out all the bugs, get all our drawings ready for Jan 3rd to hand to a machinst

and then at most all that will be left to do is design a ball shooter mechanism to bolt to the rest of the robot (the prototype we already have 2 copies of), or a pole grabber, or a ball hopper, or a platform pusher...

if we do this, at least 75% of the robot can be designed and ready to go by Jan 3rd! Why do we kill ourselves every year, trying design and build a robot in only 6 weeks, when we can really spend 52 weeks on the drawing/brainstorming/CNC setup/electronics schematics/programming/parts purchasing... part of the design cycle?