[Jonathan Norris]

Eliminate the Fix-it window. Or allow teams a much longer fix-it window.

Every year on Thursdays at every regional you see a large portion of the teams making major changes, building major components, and programing as quickly as they can. If allowing more time between regionals to give teams and opportunity to design improvements, test them, and build them and improve the quality of their robot why not. If we want a true competitive balance in FIRST, why not give a team every opportunity to improve the performance of their robot.

I know in my teams case last year we had to use the fix-it windows to make major changed to our robot, and I know how much more time would have helped us improve the quality of our robot. During the BAE regional we determined that how we had designed our arm it was going to be too difficult to score (think of 1251 last year, but harder to control...). So we stopped using our arm and played some mean defense. But every minute between matches we spent changing the design of our arm and manipulator system. We came up with a new design of the arm, with a single main joint, an extension, and a new roller-claw manipulator. We were not able to finnish the construction of the manipulator by the end of the competition (and we needed new banebots gearbox's anyway) so we decided to use our fix-it windows between BAE and Waterloo.

Back at the school we built the new manipulator and were able to do some crude testing, but truthfully what we had time to build was more of a prototype then a final product, if we had the time we would have rebuilt it after testing to make it more robust. We brought our new manipulator to waterloo on thursday, we fixed our turret in place cut off a joint for the old manipulator and cut down our extension and attached the new roller-claw. The design was great, it immediately made us a top scorer at the regional even with our major problem with consistency. The manipulator was great at sucking in the tubes, and could rotate them about 300 degrees on to the legs. Because the new manipulator was built under such time constraints we made sacrifices that came back to haunt us, it broke in some fashion during almost every match. During the quarter and semi-finals it consistently failed us. (edit: it did win us design awards at both Waterloo and GTR)

So the moral of my little story here is that I know that if we had more time between regionals we could have been even more effective and more successful at the Waterloo Regional (maybe even get to challenge 1114 in the finals again). I understand why the fix-it window is in place to stop teams from rebuilding the majority of their robot between regionals, but in reality all that team wants is to spend extra time and work to improve their robot why not let them?