Practice bot morality

[nitneylion452]

Originally Posted by avanboekel

What are your thoughts on the morality of a practice bot? Sure, you are not directly breaking the rules by working on your bot past the 6 weeks, but aren't you gaining an unfair advantage over other teams? Problems you find with your practice bot will be much quicker to find and fix once you get to competition.
Plus, you are spending more than the allotted $3500. Another advantage to teams with more sponsors/ resources.

What are your opinions?

For what I bolded, this is not necessarily true. We build a practice bot for 2011 and everything worked fine after some tweaking. We made the same tweaks on the competition bot and nothing worked properly. (Anyone at the Philly Regional last year may remember us as 3167: The team that scored nothing).

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by nitneylion452

For what I bolded, this is not necessarily true.

But more often than not, I feel that it is. It's also dependent on how alike your two robots are. Over the years, 1124 had tried it's absolute hardest to build two exactly identical robots, and we must have learned tons from our second bot. Our two robots usually very translate very well to each other, and what works on one almost always works on the other. Also, it's an added plus to have your code "just work" when you go from one robot to the other.