[Starke]

Originally Posted by JVN

The secret is simple... prototyping & continuous improvement.

Try it, break it, fix it, repeat...

Great engineering minds think alike! Dylan and I just talked about continuous improvement on our blog!

Good is never good enough

One of the attributes that separates good teams from great teams is the idea or concept of continuous improvement. Most of the upper echelon teams do not take their first idea, their first prototype, and simply put it on the robot. They use that first idea as a starting point. Once the ideas have been whittled away to one final concept they take that and refine it. Most engineers will tell you that the first design is never the best, it takes several iterations to achieve that final product. And in our world of FIRST robotics we need to adopt this concept and work with it throughout not only the build season but the competition season as well. As the game evolves and develops so must our robots in order to keep up with those elite teams and find a way to bring the entire level of competition up with us. Almost every mechanism of your robot can be advanced throughout the year. By testing and practicing you can see what works and what doesn't and how you can improve upon what does work. The more testing you do the better off your whole robot will be not only from a field team standpoint but from a standpoint of being able to change things prior to competition to cut down on your cycle time and increase your efficiency(we will talk about those two concepts later on). So please remember that although you think you may have gotten it right on the very first try and you think your product is really good, good is never good enough, there is always room for some improvement.

-Dylan