[dtengineering]

I notice this is your rookie year. Just having a robot that passes tech and moves around the field is no small acheivement. It sounds like you would like to have your robot at a more advanced stage of development, but I can assure you that you are far ahead of where we were in our rookie year.

You will find that as you learn and as your team develops that the robots will become more advanced and meeting ship deadlines will become easier. Most importantly, however, when you get to the competition you will find that there are lots of people there to help you out and lots of opportunities to improve your machine.

In our first year we got to the tournament only to discover that we couldn't turn! We had done all our testing on cement, and the carpet had wayyy to much traction. We spent our practice day modifying the robot to turn (thanks to some help from team 1241... Rick Hansen Secondary for helpful advice and a lift to Home Depot among other things) then lost every match on Friday. All day Friday the students kept working on the robot, and completely changed how the robot worked.... we won every match on Saturday... although luck played a role (bad on Friday, good on Saturday) seeing our hard work pay off made it feel like we had won the whole tournament.

Don't stress that the robot you put in the crate is not exactly the robot you WANTED to put in the crate, or the robot that you expect to finish the competition with... there are about 1,400 teams around the world thinking the exact same thing... the other 100 or so probably don't have a clue what they are getting in to!

Jason