Build Season Schedule

[nicholsjj]

http://www.slideshare.net/FrcTeam388...?from_search=1

Our team splits up into 4 groups during the build season: Mechanical, Electrical, Programming, and Media. Each group has a team leader to keep the team on schedule. We try to have a finished robot by the end of week four but I schedule the timeline for midweek 5 at the latest. Having a set time frame to build the robot really helps our team stay on track, but we have ended meetings early when no work was getting done.

As for Kickoff Saturday we do things a bit different as we hold a kickoff breakfast at our facility. We start the breakfast about an hour before the video stream starts. This way our students are awake and alert. Each student has a paper that they use to write down their immediate views of the game. We then give the students about a 10-20 min. break in order for us to print off the rules. Then I take over the room to give a brief overview of the game. The students then split into groups in order to decide on the strategy for the year. They then present their ideas and the team picks the strategy that we are going to go with. Yes, it feels a bit rushed but it does help set our team up for a great build season.

[Abhishek R]

I think we usually more or less decide our overall strategy on Kickoff. We don't do any form of prototyping that day, but it's a brainstorming/envisioning how the game will be played out, and prioritizing tasks.

During build season, we aim to prototype for 2 weeks, build a prototype bot for 2 weeks, and then build the competition bot in 1 week. Of course those are not hard deadlines, they do blend into each other at the transitions, neither has every build season played out like that. But it's a general idea.

It's definitely to your advantage the sooner you finish the robot, although it seems obvious, it gives you time for practice, programming autonomous, maybe aesthetics, and other things. I would pretend build season is only 5.5 weeks long, if not less, just so you finish slightly early to troubleshoot things.

I've been kind of wondering; how do you build a practice bot and competition bot alongside/at the same time? Especially if you don't use any/little CAD?

[pmangels17]

I think there is one piece of advice missing from this thread.

On DAY 1, print out five or six copies of the rules, ALL THE RULES, from every part of the manual, not just from the "robot" section. We keep all these books in the shop, and many students bring laptops to the shop. We spend the first day (kickoff day) prototyping and hashing out loose ideas. We create a list of the things that we want our robot to do, in a prioritized order. We do not, however, define how we are going to do these things, just that we want to do them.

This is all after every single team member READS ALL THE RULES. I apologize if this sounds rude, but it is the truth. Reading the rules is the most important part of kickoff.

Then, the week after, we begin working out the how.

Make sure you order the parts you know you will need as soon as possible. For example, we usually know within a few hours what wheels we are going to use. We order them that day, because it is then one less thing to worry about.

We also start work almost immediately on the CAD of the robot, starting with the drive base. Though we usually have a rough idea of what the drive should look like, different games may require special accomodations, and those are taken into consideration as well.

After the first week, we try to to drive system quickly and effectively. We build an electrical panel out of our usual materials as soon as we know what space it will go on, whether that space is ready or not (made from clear 1/4" corrugated polycarb, 2 sheets woth perpendicular channels, edged in 1/2 x 1/2 by 1/16 thick U-Channel).

[Mark Sheridan]

for reference, this is the pdf where 1114 outlines their build timeline:

http://www.simbotics.org/resources/team-management

[MichaelBick]

This is what we would like our build season to look like. We haven't gotten nearly this fast yet, but we're working on it. We're getting better and faster at CAD, hope to get better at prototyping, and are looking for faster and more efficient ways to get parts machined.

[Phalanx]

FIRST does publish a suggested schedule for build season.
It can be found on page 31 of this PDF on FIRST's web site.

http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default...m_handbook.pdf

We started with that, and modified it suit us.