Tips to make your team a contender?

[cxcad]

You don't have to make two full robots to get practice. This year my team decided at the last minute that we really needed practice and debugging time, so we built a second identical chassis to practice on. We just mounted our with holding allowance on it. The key here is to maximize the usage of unmodified cots parts in your with holding allowance as they don't count towards the weight. Hopefully, next year we don't have to take this short cut, but it definitely made us much more competitive.