Survey - When do you expect to have your robot complete?

[Steve W]

This survey is to see how good you are at figuring out your complete date and to get a consensus of when other teams plan on completeing their robot. Please feel free to follow up with your success dates.

[Camerzn]

We plan to finish early. Murphy's law therefore dictates that we will be drilling holes in the chassis to make the weight limit at the end of the first day of Regionals.

[Bharat Nain]

We would expect our bot to be done by Week 5, but usually its about a day or two before shipping and then the ever-famous "all nite programmin' n driva trainin'" is done.

[Billfred]

Dreamland: Week 4.
Realistically: Week 5
If something screws up: Week 6

[NoodleKnight]

Our build schedule always say that we would finish something by week for, and have week 5-6 for debugging and practice, but well, we never make the deadline. Good thing we still got Thursday.

[Ryan M.]

Originally Posted by Billfred

Dreamland: Week 4.
Realistically: Week 5
If something screws up: Week 6

Which something always does... at least twice. I'm having to go with last minute changes...

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Complete!?! You guys actually finish? "It ain't over till the fat lady sings!" I haven't heard any music yet. That sound you hear is a student on the mechanical team trying to get out of the shipping crate you closed too early.

[Alan Anderson]

To the extent that FIRST is about building robots, it's about building robots. Not about having built them.

Our 2004 robot was "complete" for competition on the last day of the Championship.

[663.keith]

I think that we finally perfected our robot the day after the off-season competition bash at the beach

[Damian Manda]

What's this about 5:00am on the ship date? Its not over until the truck comes to pick it up - more like 4-5pm on the ship date!

Actually, were usually not done until the second or last day of nationals - at least for the last two years I have participated in FIRST.

[JakeGallagher]

We usually finish up about a week before ship, maybe a little closer...most of the time though we have a working base and sometimes a prototype for the rest of the bot so that our drivers can work on getting used to how it handles.

[sanddrag]

We plan to be completely done with everything except programming on the 16th of February.

[slickguy2007]

Suprisingly enough... our robot was finished 3 weeks into the the season and another 1 week was used to figure out all of the problems and fix them. We used the rest of the time to do driver practice as well as strategy work....


GO 1403!!!

[KimT]

Originally Posted by slickguy2007

Suprisingly enough... our robot was finished 3 weeks into the the season and another 1 week was used to figure out all of the problems and fix them. We used the rest of the time to do driver practice as well as strategy work....


GO 1403!!!

What's your secret? We always have "strict" deadlines, and we work as hard as we can to meet them, but if the robot is driving at midnight the day before shipping, we feel lucky. Somehow we always seem to fall behind. Does your team have any kind of an organizational structure? Timelines? Do you pick simple, solid designs? Is it lucky team dynamics? Honestly though, if you have any advice, our team could use it. Thanks!

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by slickguy2007

Suprisingly enough... our robot was finished 3 weeks into the the season and another 1 week was used to figure out all of the problems and fix them. We used the rest of the time to do driver practice as well as strategy work....


GO 1403!!!

I would feel disappointed to finish that early. Finishing at week 3 or 4 would be like you did not challenge yourself enough. driver practice and strategy work is definitely a good thing, but you may have been able to do more with your machine.