[DFTF] The Classic Blunder...

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by Ekcrbe

I think this game was very easy to over-analyze, and many teams (including us) did. I envision lots of teams adding 29 lbs of stuff at their first competition that they ran out of time to build before Tuesday.

29 pounds of steel to put at the very bottom of our robot? We are that light with full functionality.

Also, we do not have a practice robot this year, but we are very very close, and could have if we had just committed the capital at the beginning of the season. If the entire robot is designed in CAD before any building, the building flies and takes a day or two. So when buying all your parts, you buy twice as much (cuz you should have spares anyway). If you manage to build your first robot soon enough (week 3 or 4), you can wait a bit to get all your second fabricated parts until you see some things you might want to tweak based on your testing. Then you build your second one in week 5 or 6, while practicing and doing code on the first, and you bag the second (cuz it's obviously way better) and the first is your practice machine. It's a little more capital to invest at the get go, but its also invaluable to have robot junk lying around for future prototyping, besides all the spares you now have.