Who started building before Kickoff?

[MrJohnston]

What others have stated here is dead-on.

Every off-season, our club builds two or three bases with different drive systems so that even newer students to the club have a background in building them and so that we keep our skills with different drive trains strong.

Then, as a part of our design process, we choose a drive train from those we know how to build. (No experiments with drive trains during build season! We want to maximize the time we have to spend on the manipulators.)

[rich2202]

Jesse reminded me of something:

If you have the money to build 2 robots, the practice bot's base can be built prior to kickoff.

Our team does all the testing with the practice bot, and the competition bot is built in the last 2 weeks of build season. At that point, the practice bot is modified to be as close to the competition bot as possible.

The practice bot also gives the programmers time to enhance the code after stop build, and the mechanical people the ability to continue upgrading the robot (hold back).

Originally Posted by rich2202

Jesse reminded me of something:

If you have the money to build 2 robots, the practice bot's base can be built prior to kickoff.

Our team does all the testing with the practice bot, and the competition bot is built in the last 2 weeks of build season. At that point, the practice bot is modified to be as close to the competition bot as possible.

The practice bot also gives the programmers time to enhance the code after stop build, and the mechanical people the ability to continue upgrading the robot (hold back).

I applaud the team who can design and build a practice bot base to play the game before they know what the game is.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by MrJohnston

Every off-season, our club builds two or three bases with different drive systems so that even newer students to the club have a background in building them and so that we keep our skills with different drive trains strong.

Then, as a part of our design process, we choose a drive train from those we know how to build. (No experiments with drive trains during build season! We want to maximize the time we have to spend on the manipulators.)

We're moving that way, along a different path. While we recycle most of our manipulator pieces between years (we did keep our Frisbee shooter, it's great for demos), we've begun keeping the drive chassis from each year. At the start of next build season, we expect to have a 6-wheel skid steer, an H-drive, and a mecanum ready to go to support manipulator prototyping. We usually decide on the drive train rather quickly, so the competition drive train should be (nearly) ready when we to build the competition manipulators.