POLL: Six Week Build Season

[GeeTwo]

I voted for no change. While it is pointless to think that FIRST could level the playing field when the first rule of FRC competition is that "if it isn't forbidden, it's allowed." (I'm excluding the core values and mission of FIRST here, and focusing on the competition part.) Some of the inequalities can, however be mitigated, and should be. Bagging the robot dates back to when teams were required to ship robots to each event, and from event to event. Requiring the same "stop build day" reduced the inequalities between teams in early vs late regionals and between those located near and far from their regional. The "hands off" rules still help equalize between teams near and far from their regional. (In the interest of full disclosure, we're located about an hour drive from Bayou and "day trip" the tournament.) After so many years in the "hands off but development may continue" mode, going to a "tools down" rule would likely be ignored or seriously circumvented by many teams, and could prove to be a "gateway vice" to ignoring other rules. As a co-worker of mine once told me "the first rule of leadership is to never give an order that won't be followed."

Removing the stop build altogether would not be unreasonable, but we've used it to impose additional build discipline. For 2014 Aerial Assist, we built a prototype robot, "Woody" (guess what his skeleton was made of) and a competition robot, "Buzz". We bagged Buzz, but continued to develop code, driver skill, and maintenance procedures on "Woody" at a pace more relaxed than late build season, more similar to early build season. Last year, we built what were supposed to be twins, with "Atlas" being the guinea pig and construction on "Peabody" running about a week behind until the beginning of week six. We completed Peabody, ran some test suites, pulled the "rake" (which turned out to be different between the two robots) to be part of our withholding allowance, and bagged. Atlas was then primarily the "practice" robot. The mechanical and wiring team was then "hands off" of Peabody apart from maintenance, repairs, and quickly-installed upgrades. The programming team had a few "extra" sessions where they came in to tweak and tune code, but they knew they had to leave a stable bit of code for the next drive practice session. This discipline worked very well for us. Of course, if build season ended at CMP, we'd work out another discipline.
"Maintenance Windows" - yuck! Each team would be filling out dozens of forms and chucking dozens of tags into the landfill. Another of the great things about building a practice robot is that it is also a demo robot; you can have your drivers drive at demos and you only need to consume one tag and complete one tag form per event you participate in.