[dtengineering]

I have a real love/hate relationship with the ship date. I love the sense of accomplishment when a working robot ships. I love people's response when they learn that you did "all that" in six weeks. But I hate having to skip lessons on how stuff works, or why we're doing things certain ways due to the pressure of the ship date. (This year we had just two adult mentors... so we're running a bit shorthanded). And I really hate shipping off a robot that isn't ready to play the game. I don't mind shipping one that isn't ready to win the game... but we owe it to ourselves and our alliance partners to be able to make a meaningful contribution to the game.

But for all that, I do support the idea of a firm and fixed shipping/bagging date.

But I really, really, really like the witholding limit, too. Tonight I was able to sit down with a half dozen students in a fairly relaxed setting (with the Canada-Russia game streaming over the internet, of course... ) and grease up the gearboxes that got delayed for ten days by Canada customs, and show them how planetary gearboxes work, and do a bit of experimenting to get our "ball magnet" roller up and running.

On the "to do" list is to finalize our kicker design (we've had the rough dimensions worked out since the second or third week of build) and attach some IR rangefinders to help the driver find the ball.

As we're in a later regional this year, we'll have a chance to do this at a much more comfortable, relaxed, and enjoyable pace than we would during build.

So I don't think "fixed build date" and "witholding limit" are mutually incompatible. I think they work together to give a pretty good compromise.

I also have to say that while I love the year-long competition for our five VEX teams because it lets them redesign and re-build between competitions (we compete at five different VEX tournaments, each roughly a month apart here in the BC/WA area), a VEX robot rebuild is much less demanding of my time than an FRC rebuild would be.

And, with respect to some earlier posts in this thread, my experience with FRC over seven years has been that it continues to evolve. And thank goodness for that... stagnation would be far worse than a change that some people didn't like. There are many possible ways to extend the build period without burning out... we could start with a three week "design period" during which no tools could be used, and no parts could be machined. Or we could have a longer build period, but require teams to log their time and limit it to 10 hours per week of total meeting and shop time. I KNOW we could get more mentors involved if they only had to make a committment twice each week and could still play a meaningful role in the design.

Jason