Poll on winning teams using practice bots

[AllenGregoryIV]

Spectrum built a practice bot this year for the 1st time. (This is my first year with a practice bot and also with this team though I have been doing FIRST for 10 years).

Our regional schedule put us at a week 5 and 6 regional. If we didn't have a practice bot we would have been sitting on our hands for 5 weeks not doing anything. Our practice bot wasn't that costly at all, after you consider that we wanted to have spare gearboxes, motors, and sensors for our robot anyway the cost was essentially just the metal which was under $200. We gutted most of the control system (cRIO, jaguars & camera) from the real robot before we bagged it and installed it all again on Thursday during our 1st event.

The practice bot was useful and it did give a second group of students the chance to basically build the robot. However we didn't have a place to setup a practice field and I feel like that really limited the usefulness of the practice bot. We still learned a lot of things about the robot during the events because we were never able to really put the practice bot through it's paces on a practice field for very long.