What to do after this season ends?

[ksafin]

Hi,

We're rookie team 3992 and our season just came to an end after the South Florida Regional (aka, we didn't qualify for St.Louis, and we aren't participating in any more regionals).

I know there is a lot of work to be done before next years build season, but can anyone put me on a track or path of how to get started right now?

I feel like after this regional everything feels a bit empty; I'm finding myself rewatching videos and looking at pictures to fill the void, so I'm eager to start working towards next year.

Thanks,
Kirill.

[EricH]

Offseason competitions. Especially tune in to IRI. (IRI: Indiana Robotics Invitational, AKA The REAL Championship. Biggest and best field of any offseason.) I believe Tempest 'N Tampa is in your area.

Build a promo-bot.

Do demos with your competition robot.

Find more sponsors of all types.

Recruit.

But before you do any of that, sit down and evaluate the season. What went well? What went wrong? Good ideas, bad ideas--and be honest with yourself. How can you improve for next year?

[jblay]

You guys should definitely try to take your robot to an off-season event. I am not sure what there is in your area but I am sure there is something. They are fun and relatively inexpensive. Between 100 and 500 dollars. You can test out your drive team for next year and try and optimize your robot in any way that you would have if you were attending the championship.

I also recommend making some plans for an off-season project. Making a mechanism like a lift or an arm or a really solid drive train in the off-season and understanding all the little details of the mechanism can put you in great shape for 2013.

Best of luck in the off-season to you, robotics never really has an off-season if you organize it that way.

Originally Posted by ksafin

I feel like after this regional everything feels a bit empty; I'm finding myself rewatching videos and looking at pictures to fill the void, so I'm eager to start working towards next year.

I've seen these signs before. Your first year, and during the "relax" time, you feel strange. You find it odd when you have free time, sleeping in sounds weird to you, as does going to bed before midnight. You will continue to have memories and talk about the competition months after it's gone....

Your diagnosis: You're hooked on FIRST.

Great to hear, because as your first "offseason" starts, your work has barely begun! It's now time to do many things, especially as a rookie, and the number one thing you need to do is work on your team organization. Get the team leaders and mentors together, and talk about what was good, what was bad, and what needed to change based on how you did things in the build season and the competition. Write it all down. Think of how you can be more efficient, how much time to allot to things you never thought of alloting time to.

SEARCH FOR SPONSORS. You just completed your rookie season. You know what FIRST is, and that FIRST works. You've seen the metamorphosis amongst the students on the team, and how they are affected by being on the team. SHOW THAT TO YOUR POTENTIAL SPONSORS. I cannot stress that enough. You've developed a strong mechanical base, now you need to build on the business side of the team. Money is huge in FIRST. Though it doesn't mean everything, it is always useful to have.

Prepare for offseason events! Look around your local area for offseason events your team can attend in the fall. Not only is it a great way to start the team again for the new school year, but it also lets the new students get a little taste as to what the competition is about. It helps get them excited. It's also a great way to train your drivers/see who is the best at driving. If you are financially able to, attend more than one offseason. They help tremendously.

Talk to local successful teams! Ask what they did to be successful, and build around what they do to work for your team. It's rare to find a 100% original idea in engineering. Much of engineering is taken and reused over and over. We don't reinvent the wheel each year, but we improve on it. See what works, then change it.

Go team member recruiting! You have a robot in hand, and that's the coolest thing most high schoolers are going to see! Show it off, talk about the exciting competition! There's even an award for teams who Inspire the most Engineering in the world. (can you guess what it is?)

And most of all: Have fun! Go outside, see your families! Remind your neighbors you still live next to them. Go swimming, take a hike, see your house in the daylight. The season is over, and even people like me need to take a break from FIRST. Don't worry, you'll know when you need to come back.

[Alexa Stott]

A few things you could do...

1. Go to some off-season competitions. In Florida, Tempest 'n' Tampa has taken place the past few years in the fall. There are also off-seasons in Georgia (GRITS), South Carolina (SCRIW), and many others depending on how far you can/will travel. Keep an eye on the Off-Season Events subforum for announcements and updates about these events.
2. Get out in your community! As a rookie, you might not be so well-known by the local people. If your town/surrounding area has any sort of fair/festival/carnival/whatever, see if there is any way you can get involved. In the past, my team has done robot demonstrations at our town's Heritage Day and marched in the Memorial Day Parade. It's great publicity for the team. This year's robot is especially exciting for these events because crowds love to see balls flying everywhere.
3. Fundraise! While you're not busy with the stress of build season, this is a great time to organize and hold fundraisers for the upcoming season.
4. Prototyping. Lots of teams use this time to play around with design ideas. You can spend the off-season working on a new drive train, coming up with cool ideas to implement on future robots, working with new sensors, etc. without having to worry about any sort of deadlines. Just be sure you read up on the rules about using anything you design/build in next year's robot. Typically, you can design/prototype anything you want, so long as it is not the final product that you use on the actual robot.
5. Relax! Take a few weeks off, regroup, pull up those grades that were likely slipping during build/competition season. Our team usually likes to have a barbecue at the end of the season at our mentor's or a member's house. A completely robotics-free day of volleyball, hamburgers, and relaxation.

[1502]

We recommend exactly what Eric said. We also use this time to work on our robot carts.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/6672194...n/photostream/

[Chinmay]

One of the things that I love to do right after the regionals, but while im still resting and dont want to start an entirely new project, is to go back and document what the team has done over the course of the 6 weeks and competitions. Doing a build season log is hard for some teams to finish during build season, but you can always go back and fill in the gaps to create a nice document describing your robot. As you mentioned, you're looking at pictures, and this is something i find myself dong all the time. It would be awesome if you wanted to make a team scrapbook to help save all those memories. Also, many teams like to make highlight reels of their robot to show parents and sponsors.

I'm trying to stick to nontechnical things that you can do by yourself, because I've noticed that oftentimes, people need a short break right after the competition is over to catch up on schoolwork and sleep. Even if you may be excited to keep working, your mentors and teammates may want a short rest.

Perhaps later in the year, you can begin to work on improving you rebound rumble robot. Regardless of if you're competing in an offseason event in the fall, rebuilding aspects of the robot provides a good opportunity for reflection about your design. Furthermore, you can incorporate what you've learned from other teams. Once you've built a feature once, or at least thought about it, you can easily recycle a design and do something similar in future years. Working on an existing robot also can help you save some money since you already have a testbed for whatever features you may want to add or refine.

[Mark Sheridan]

Well this has been on the to do list for 3309 far too long. We should have done this a long time ago: build a reliable 2-speed tank drive.

We have done mecanums two years in a row. They are fun to drive but we have grown weary of their traction and pushing force compromises. We would have done tank this year if we were not stretch so thin in terms of CAD resources. We cut a corner and did a drivetrain we did last year so we could devote more resources to our shooter.

What we should have done was work on a really good tank drive in fall. There are so many ways one can go about this.

It could be team 1114 kitbot on steroids: http://www.simbotics.org/files/pdf/1...structions.pdf

Or: upgrade it to have a two speed gearbox.

or: we have been looking at team 33's and 973's CAD models of west coast drive.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2515
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2567

What I hope achieve is that is allows my students to have practice at CAD, expands our knowledge bade, gives us a platform to test with and finally gives us a proven design solution that we could us for next years game.

Our hope is that our final product will allow us to test gyro code for steering, autonomous dead reckoning and various PID controls.

I hope this gives you some ideas for the summer.

[Suitster]

I would form a list of things that you did not include in your robot this year because you are a rookie team (pneumatics, vision targeting, autonomous, encoders, different drive systems (mecanum wheels seem to be on sale after the build season), and learn to use them for next year.

That's what we are planning on doing after St. Louis

[PayneTrain]

If you choose to go to an off-season competition (which you should), you should definitely go over a design review. I believe a quick search on CD Media will lead you a presentation template Cyber Blue 234 uses for their design review. You can always take the option of applying lessons learned over the season into improvements for this year's robot if you go to an offseason competition, or just take concepts you learned and apply them for prepartaion for 2013.

Seriously though, go to offseason events. We always go to one, and we want to make it back to Duel on the Delaware, go to Beantown Blitz, and check out IRI in addition to R3. We wre spoiled in the northeast with offseason events but it's a great thing to do. It's a relaxed atmosphere and a chance to talk to other teams without any stress involved. Definitely a different pace for the drive team and leadership.

[JamesCH95]

I always like a nice long discussion with my team about what worked, what didn't work, what we want to work on, and cool robot mechanisms/designs/strategies that we saw. It's a nice decompression and sparks interest in the upcoming season.

[Clark Pappas]

Well, I guess I can start by beating a dead horse; find an off-season event(s) in your area, and plan on going. These are great for new and old students alike. Not much more to say on this, everyone else had this pretty well covered.

Another thing you should do is immediately is a season and regional "Critique". Go over everything that went right and wrong. Strengthen your Pros, and fix your Deltas. Did a certain part of your design always break down? Did you lack tool organization? Is there a tool, material, or machine that you found yourself constantly needing but never had access to? Did your drivers not have enough information on the other teams going into matches? These are just a few things to start looking at.

The next step, I would say, would be to clean up, take inventory, and restock. Get your workspace spick and span, with everything properly stored and organized. Take a look at all the materials you have left; bolts, electrical connectors, spare electronics, and so on. Is there something that needs to be restocked? (For us, it's long 1/4-20 Bolts). Also, take a look back at any electrical connector, any fastener or adhesive, ect. that you needed during season, but didn't have. (For us, it would be 45 amp APP crimps)

Then, I would get on starting fundraising, public outreach, and recruitment. Demonstrate your bot at your highschool(s). Go demonstrate it to the incoming 8th graders at your local middle school. Work your way into events, rallies, parades, ect. in an effort to get the word out about your team. And then start hunting for money. Apply for grants, hosts fundraisers like an E-Waste or "robotics night" at a restaurant where you could get a percent of the profits.

The last step for an off-season is projects and preparation to help make your next build season the best it can be. Here are a few ideas:

• Prototype Drive Base
  This can be costly, but if there is ever a time to move to a new drive system, it's your off-season. Decide on a budget, drive and frame type, ect, and have all team members help design it. Personally, I would have "teams" of students make something in CAD or on paper, and then combine all of the teams Ideas together on one final design, and would build that. Be weary of the complication on the design; don't go beyond what your team can manage building during season
• Improve the previous year's robot
  Go back and improve what you can. Fix faulty design areas, automate things by adding sensors, tamper with hybrid mode, try out a new drive gearbox, and so on.
• Battery "Cart"
  Build some sort of "System" for keeping batteries charged, organized, and cared for. When I was on 973, we had more of a shelve than a cart; two people would carry it by the handles on it's side, and it kept the batteries well organized and kept the cable mess in check. Some people like to build theirs onto a literal cart to easily transport their batteries, too.
• Pit Items
  Build or obtain things improve pit organization and safety. This can range from shelves to tables to carts

Just my $0.02 on the matter. There are a great deal of things that can be done; it all boils down to two things though, and that's to improve and prepare.

[DominickC]

Offseason events and fundraisers are always good options. Robot exhibitions are also fun.

Team 23 began participating in FIRST in 1995, and took a 12 year hiatus from FIRST to focus on BattleBots. Now returning to FIRST, Plymouth North and Plymouth South High Schools plan on competing in offseason competitions, holding robot showcases, and hosting+competing in BattleBot events.

[Hawiian Cadder]

We typically have not done a whole lot in the off-season. Last year we built a prototype drive-train, and I designed a robot for every year past of FRC. This year we had our best season to date, and built our best robot to date.

A few thins I might do
Build a drive-train
Build a 500 series motor gearbox using the FP gears.
Work on driver software with this years robot.

[VexisDarksteele]

I know that your team is young and may not have the resources yet, but our team is planning to start some intensive student training in the coming weeks. Basically, we've got a mentor for each category (CAD, machining, electrical, leadership/organization, strategy/design, etc.), and he/she shall take a group of our members and treat it like a class. There'll even be projects and assignments for us during these segments. Then, once we've learned all we need in that subject, we'll move onto the next. This way, we keep our members interested, and they'll come back next year with a comprehensive and flexible way of thinking. We're also starting a VEX team for the newer members, so that they can gain some first-hand experience in building and designing. Maybe your team could try something similar?
Over summer, we'll also be hosting seminars for other local teams around our community, as we have been approached by several of them over the past few days. Try getting in contact with other teams — see if there's something that they can help teach you, or if you can help them! Forming strong bonds with other teams is an advantageous and rewarding experience.