Some Rookie Advice (Wait, no we're the ones that need it so...eh nvm)

[kroll]

Hello all of my fellow FIRST participants

I am a new team leader of a rookie team in southern Virginia. As you can no doubt guess I join most if not all of you in being stressed out of my mind. I'm pretty sure we are behind and our plan is more or less floating around in our heads. We have 3 great mentors and many volunteers coming in to help us out but I still can't shake the feeling that we are completely lost. I would really appreciate it if anyone can give us some general advice on surviving the first year or any advice for that matter. Mistakes you might have made, common problems you may have run into, maybe even a tip or two about how to go about playing the game this year.

Thanks everyone! I am still shocked at the level kindness we have been treated by everyone involved with FIRST. It makes me wish I could stay in high school a few more years.

[Vikesrock]

Sounds like you could use some MOEmentum

[jee7s]

This is a list of a few thoughts that come to mind:

1. Make sure your team is communicating.

2. Standardize.

3. Ask questions first, build later...but not too late.

4. Write things down.

5. Think things through.

6. Play to win -- make sure your robot accomplishes the tasks of the game.

7. Practice and test.

8. Remember it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Hope that helps somewhat.

[MagiChau]

You may or not heard this but, at least make sure your robot does at least one thing well whether it is hanging tubes, running with tubes or playing defense.

[Colin P]

I'm also a team leader of a rookie team this year, and it is a handful.
Just try to keep in mind that the most important thing to accomplish in the rookie year is good team structure. Having a good robot is nice, but it is most important for you to set up the team to ensure future success.

Mentoring rookie students is an uphill battle. As much as I want to give them control over the robot and what goes into it, they simply do not know how a FIRST robot is made. The big problem I've had this season is trying to have them build a good robot without controlling them too much.

It's very helpful to have a veteran team to ask for assistance. Team 857, Superior Roboworks, has been giving me some great advice. Any veteran team would be more than happy to assist a rookie with anything.

It's a lot to handle, but it's such a great experience. I'm so happy to have had this opportunity. Once the dust settles, I think we'll all be feeling a lot better.

[Alex2614]

Hello, I am from FRC team 2614 from Morgantown, West Virginia. We were a rookie team in 2008, coming from an area where teams have folded due to everything from lack of funding to interfering with basketball, so we know how hard it can be to start and sustain a team. Here's some advice on an organizational/sustainability standpoint:

-Communication is the biggest. I have seen many clubs/organizations (outside robotics) that have died because of lack of communication. Our team has an email ListServ that has proven to be an immensely helpful tool (we are getting approx. 20-30 robotics emails a day on a slow day).

-Keep your community informed about what you are doing. Write to your local paper and explain what FIRST is (I'm assuming there are no other FRC teams in your area?). Write to your local businesses and invite them to see your progress (and get some spare change on the side). Hold an open house before ship date to demo the robot to the community. There are endless possibilities, but if you can get your community behind you, that's a big factor in sustaining a team.

-Keep all members involved. Specialization is the key. While you don't have to have a strict specialization setup (we don't), it is a good way to keep everyone involved in something.

-Brainstorming before building. We just started cutting metal last weekend. Weigh pros and cons of everything several times, and draw everything out beforehand. Planning is everything.

-There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking a "rookie" approach to the game. We did that our rookie year, and ended up winning a regional as a passive and defensive bot. From what I have seen, rookie teams that don't try to tackle every aspect of the game (i.e. Maybe not getting all three rows, etc.) have done much better than rookie teams that try to do everything. I'm not saying your team does not have the capability, because I wouldn't know. I'm not trying to be judgmental, but it's just what I've seen. Every team was a rookie once before, right? They all know what it's like and understand.

-Getting advice from older teams, just like you are doing with this thread, is very important. At competitions, the other teams are more than willing to help with anything. We've just about built whole robots for other teams at competitions, so no amount of help is too much to ask for. Go around and ask them to explain how their machines work and why they chose to tackle the challenge the way they did. You can learn A LOT from these discussions and pictures of their machines.

As far as problems we have run into, I can't think of anything that would have changed anything drastically. There is a lot of little stuff that we eventually overcame. It's all a part of the experience, though.
Our rookie year, we met as a team for the first time the day of kickoff. There were 11 of us and 2 mentors; we didn't know each other, as we came from two cross-town rival schools. We had no idea what we were doing. We were just a disorganized group of high school students that met together over the weekends. But we emerged as a close group of friends. We ended up winning not only the regional, but also the Rookie All-Star Award as well. We ahve grown substantially since then. Anyway, I apologize, I didn't mean to ramble about my team. But what I'm trying to say is that anything is possible. If we could do it, you can do it. And, you have succeeded even if you come home without a single trophy. You became a part of the FIRST community, and had a great adventure and learning experience. That takes some serious effort and that alone deserves great recognition. It will only get better from here.

I'm sorry I wrote so much, but I hope it was helpful. Welcome to FIRST, guys! And good luck this year! Feel free to email me if you have any further questions at alexkstout@gmail.com

[rutzman]

Reported

[Henry Williams]

Hi, I'm a junior and Vice President on team 461 out of West Lafayette IN and I have one, make that two important things to say...
1 Make sure you have a solid idea to run with for your robot soon if you do not already. It doesn't matter as much what you do with your robot but how well you do whatever it is. The last few years we have had problems taking too long to design the robot and not leaving the time for tinkering with the final product (though we have still been fairly successful).
2 Just have fun. Whatever you do make sure you remember that you and your team are doing this to have fun!

-good luck from team 461!

[2829ron]

Originally Posted by kroll

Hello all of my fellow FIRST participants

I am a new team leader of a rookie team in southern Virginia. As you can no doubt guess I join most if not all of you in being stressed out of my mind. I'm pretty sure we are behind and our plan is more or less floating around in our heads. We have 3 great mentors and many volunteers coming in to help us out but I still can't shake the feeling that we are completely lost. I would really appreciate it if anyone can give us some general advice on surviving the first year or any advice for that matter. Mistakes you might have made, common problems you may have run into, maybe even a tip or two about how to go about playing the game this year.

Thanks everyone! I am still shocked at the level kindness we have been treated by everyone involved with FIRST. It makes me wish I could stay in high school a few more years.

Weigh the robot before to close to shipping time . Well, unless you like shaving 40 lbs. off the robot the night before (that was a long night).

[PayneTrain]

Hey kroll, I'm Wil, Web Presence of Team 422 out of Richmond, Virginia here.

Remember that everyone is always behind, but everyone also knows the final goal: February 22nd. Right now, you need to put together some benchmarks so your team is on the right track. If your team has not started building yet, don't worry! Most teams (mine included) carefully spend the first two weeks building prototypes of our ideas. Hope you all are hitting the drills and saws soon though.

There are some experienced teams out of the Hampton Roads area that should be eager to help you with a more physical presence. When I saw Southern Virginia, I figured me and some team mates could drive out to see how you guys were doing on a closed shop day. However, it's hard to cut out a 4 hour round trip drive during exams.

If you don't mind, take some pictures and upload them to Chief Delphi. Include some blurbs on your progress. For example, don't just say "We can't put together the electronics board!" Describe the problem that is holding you back.

Even though I'm only a student, I'm sure that I could round up some mentors on my team to help. In addition, there is a wealth of knowledge both in archived threads on CD, and the grizzled ancients/beloved mentors from some great veteran teams. We aren't just focused on the progress of the bot; we are also focused on the progression of the team's knowledge base, a key to sustainability.

However, the robot is still important. If you have not finalized a design yet, make sure it can accomplish the task at hand. In fact, it's time to break out my three tier list for robot design.
1. Robots that accomplish the primary goal
2. Robots that operate to fill secondary roles (role players)
3. Robots that are broken/invisible

You want to aim for tier 1, prepare for tier 2, and AVOID tier 3. Get the C-base and other assorted parts together to make sure you cna at least get a good kitbot running.

I'm going to cut it short for now, since I'm tired and have tests to study for (gotta keep up the grades to keep up the build), but feel more than free to contact me personally at thomaswpayne@gmail.com if you have any questions. Responses will not be immediate, in order to confirm accuracy. I don't want to tell you the wrong stuff. If you are interested in any other contact info, feel free to email me.

I also assume I will be seeing your team at the VA regional. I would be happy to stop by, and bring some other members along, to exchange pleasantries and information, and lend out a metric kit if necessary.

I wish your team the best of luck! Remember what FIRST is all about (hint: it's not supposed to be Freaking in Really Scary Times)

[sircedric4]

The posts before this seem to cover the team structure and schedule suggestions adequately. Here are a few technical lessons learned from my rookie year 6 years ago.

1) Pin all shafts, set screws will slip. My rookie year was Aim High and we had a conveyor belt feeding the balls into our shooter and we used set screws on a flattened shaft thinking it would be fine. It wasn't.

2) Weigh the robot frequently with a good scale capable of handling the entire robot. We used a bathroom scale our rookie year, doing the half a robot at a time method and had to cut 12 lbs in the pits on Thursday. That was ugly.

3) The 28" X 38" X 60" envelope is inviolate. You have to put your robot in a box of those dimensions and there is no slop. Build your chassis an inch shorter, we do 27"X37"X59" to account for bolt heads, and unsquare frames. My rookie year we were putting our robot against a wall and bashing it to square it up to fit.

4) Use locknuts during your build. We initially used regular nuts while building, and were going to locktite everything at the end. We basically lost a couple nights, unbolting every bolt to loctite the nuts. Using locknuts at the beginning saves a lot of time at the end. You will need some locking feature on all threaded fasteners or else your robot will vibrate itself to its inevitable doom.

That's just the list of rookie mistakes I made. We had no idea what we were getting into, and didn't learn about Chief Delphi till my second year. You already have half the battle fought by knowing to ask for help here.

And this thread lists a lot of other good technical lessons learned:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=89568

[P. Fuller]

1. When you are designing your robot, make sure that your mentors are involved at all stages in the process. They know what will work, and what will either break, not be reliable, or be unsafe. This will save you a lot of time, and tears.
2. When you are building your robot and cut materials for it, do not use a hacksaw. Use either a table saw (if appropriate), a band saw, or a miter saw. This will help you get straighter and more accurate cuts, and will make your robot look better overall.
3. Try to give your programmers as much time with a drivable robot as you can. They will not be happy if they get it the day before ship, and it will probably be a bad job (the programs will be crap.) Try to give the completed robot to your programmers at the end of Week 5/beginning of Week 6, as you will have some time to practice driving before the competition, and the programmers will have time to do a good job.
4. Most importantly, HAVE FUN! This is supposed to be something you do for fun, because you like robotics and building things. Don't make it a chore, or just something you have to do, as then it defeats the purpose of doing robotics.

Good Luck!

[quinxorin]

Everyone else seems to have covered most of the bases, but here's a link to my team's build schedule. http://lightningrobotics.com/forum/a...3&d=1262867950
For a rookie team, I would recommend two major things:
1. Make sure at least one part of your robot works. Namely, the drive train. If you haven't decided yet (which you should have by the second or third day at the latest) here's my team's drive train presentation:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13241970/pres.zip
2. Do exactly what you did - seek help.

If you have any questions, feel free to pm me, not just on team organization but on designs as well.

[HarveyAce]

We were a rookie team last year (3329), and it would seem that last year was better for us than this year. One thing that you MUST be sure to do is to set your team up so that next year you get ONLY people that are going to be serious about being involved. This year we are running into the trouble of having a bunch of people that don't care and only a few that do, and our chassis isn't even done yet as a result. Take everyone's advice about that it isn't how good of a robot that you can build, it's about having a team that communicates and functions well with the leaders that are in place, because that is the main purpose of FIRST: to develop leaders of tomorow. do your reserch before deciding on a design, and get most of the major descisons done in the first week, because if you don't, they won't get done effectively. GOOD LUCK!

[Mr_I]

In addition to all of the above thoughts, I'd like to add a thought that goes beyond just building the robot: you team needs to be prepared for your regional. When 811 was a rookie and went to our first competition, no one told us what to expect. As a team we were blown away by the festive, almost trade show like atmosphere in the pit area, team social, etc. Much of the weekend we sat pie eyed watching, rather than participating in, the off-field activities.

I see (on the FIRST website) that you're going to the Virginia Regional on April 7-9. If possible, you should see if you can get at least some of the team to attend another regional, to get an idea of what you're headed into. There are two events within a few hours in your are which happen in the weeks before Virginia: Baltimore on 3/17-19 (~150 miles from Richmond) & DC on 3/24-26 (~100 miles).

Whether you can make it to Baltimore or DC, make sure you have some portion of your team working on what we call Marketing: Who you are, what makes you worth watching, etc. And while you're at the VA regional, make sure you have the non-drivers / pit crew watching ALL of the other rounds, taking notes and scouting the other teams' strengths and weaknesses; also send students scouting to the other pit areas between rounds. And make sure you meet with your alliance partners before each match, so you can maximize your team's strengths.