Pre-Ship Scrimmage

[Arefin Bari]

Every year, Children of the Swamp (team 179) hosts a pre-ship scrimmage down here in South Florida. They have a decent size shop where they can fit almost a full field. They use the BOM given to us by FIRST and makes a almost complete field. They invite teams out the weekend before ship to test out their robots. I think Dan or Chet from team 179 can help you with all the questions you have much better. Please send a pm to Swampdude with questions you have. Good luck.

[Kims Robot]

We host a pre-ship scrimmage on the day before ship in our area. A few of our team members spend most of build season building up a field of our own, and have carpet from past years, and try to save the electronics we built up as well as the field borders (normally made from metal rails in 4x4s, and a frame of 2x4s for the driver station) to use every year.

We generally set up a small concessions area, and we bring in full media including live cameras and a field clock display. Our local labview guru wrote a field controller in labview, and we use that to enable and disable the robots. We set up driver stations on tables, and have them plug into competition ports that we can control through the labview code.

Our first year we were much less extravagent than this. We ran on the stage in the auditorium, and just had lightswitch controls for enable/disable. So you can go as big or as little as you want, usually the point is just to give teams a chance to test their robots on a full size field against other robots. Its invaluable for teams to get this experience before the regional. We have many teams that sit in our pit area making modifications from things they learned during the trial times.

For our team it has become fairly simple. We dont have a full committee for this, we run this event, Ruckus and two FLL events every year, so our team has gotten good at knowing how to get things done. We normally have one person doing the coordination (sending info to the teams, organizing the food, and making sure we have all the right pieces: media, field, room reservations), other than that, we build the field and have the parents run the concessions, we generally bring in a few local buisiness owners to speak, and have a great time!

Let me know if you have any questions or need help with it. I think the biggest thing is to realize the point of a pre-ship scrimmage. It doesnt have to be as glitzy as an offseason and if you stick with that you wont burn your team out.

[Mike Rush]

In Arizona we have the "Duel in the Desert" originally sponsored by Team 64 - The Gila Monsters. Since team 64 broke up into two teams, the Duel was sponsored by Team 2380 Jag Robotics. You could contact them for advice.

Mike Rush
Team Caution