[keen101]

my biggest advice is to keep things simple (KISS).

when designing you robot expect that things will break. It is much easier to fix/replace things if it was designed to be simple (or have simple parts) in the first place.

when designing our robot we use a chalkboard heavily. We write down all possible strategies, and then write down which combination will give us the most points, while still being simple [to fix]. We then write down what features we want and vote on each system. It usually turns out okay, as long as we really do stick with the KISS method. There have been a couple things that came out pretty neat, but were actually time consuming to fix/replace, and therefore really hurt us in the long run because we forgot about KISS.