Practice bots: OK with rules/spirit of competition?

[brian3795]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

One thing you have to consider: resources. Do you have to money, time, manpower to build a second robot?

Good point. We will probably have the resources for a practice bot, and we don't plan on building the second one concurrently. We'll just do our best to document what we have before we ship.

Now that we know the option is open, we can start planning for this.

[Chris Fultz]

If you have the resources, you will probably find there is a real benefit to building a "practice robot" first and then use your design and lessons learned from that first one to build a second, competition robot.

The second one goes together much faster, and the electronics team, programmers and drivers have the first one to work and learn on.

[Koko Ed]

We build a practice bot with the "intention" of having it done by week 2 (most of the time we more likely see iy by week 3 or 4) and then build the final robot afterwards improving on what was learned from building the first robot.
It all depends on the time and resources you have to build it but I would highly reccomend you do it. It is a valuble resource to have for your drives team.

[pfreivald]

We are building two -- one for competition, the other 'close enough' (because of cost issues in building two that are truly identical).

It is important to make the 'close enough' robot controlled exactly the same way as the competition robot -- and as close as possible mechanically as well.

...and while part of me envies the month between bag-n-tag and your first regional, part of me is very glad that FLR is week one!

[BJC]

Even if you cannot make another full robot due to time, materials, money, etc having just a chassis is still worthwhile. It allows for driver practice among other things. If you can practice even for 3 hours (I mean actual drills, not just driving around) you will have more experience then most teams by the end of their season. That is a HUGE advantage!

[Trying to Help]

We only have one Classmate this year and are working on a practice bot. Is there a way to run both robots, alternating? We also have only one wireless access point.

Thanks for any pointers!

[MagiChau]

Could you try and find someone willing to donate or sell an old laptop at the least and install the Driver Station software on it so you have another Driver Station.

For the router problem I am afraid you probably will have to try and get another one. The robot is suppose to have a certain IP address in the network, you can't have both of them with the same address in the same network.

[apalrd]

Originally Posted by ZonChau

For the router problem I am afraid you probably will have to try and get another one. The robot is suppose to have a certain IP address in the network, you can't have both of them with the same address in the same network.

By my count (Assuming they haven't broken their old ones) they should have 3. The Linksys DS radio from 2009, the Linksys gaming bridge from 2009, and the new bridge/radio from 2011.

There are two options for setup on this:

1. Run each as its own network. This would require two DS computers (including your Classmate, so you just need to find another one). You would run the practice bot using the pair of 2009 radios and the extra laptop, and the competition bot using the new 2011 radio and the Classmate. You would need two sets of driver controls as well, which might not be easy if you use the Cypress board.

2. Run one as a different team. Pick a team you like, or another number you won't forget. Image the practice bot as so, and setup the second laptop and old radios as well. In LabVIEW, you could create a new build specification for practice, which would just change the robot IP.

Or you could just not use them both at once. If you need to run another robot against the practice bot (maybe a boxbot or a kitbot or something for driver anti-defensive training?) you could just use an IFI control system. You wouldn't even need to program it (gotta love default code).

[Trying to Help]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I'll pass along the suggestions to our software team.

I'm personally thrilled that this is our third year and we've finally gotten to the point that we'll be able to test and do driver training.