Assuming your team has one, what do teams put on their pre/post-match checklists? This can be as specific or as general as you’d like.
Our team currently has this:
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Everything
This is last years Checklist, 95% of it is checked after every match. 1 Programming, 1 electrical, and 2 mechanical students go over it . It may seem like overkill but in the heat of competition you forget things, and if you forget twice it breaks when you aren’t looking. This process has directly saved ~10+ matches that I know of since 2017. And has helped catch small things that could have become bigger issues if not caught as soon as it happened.
2022 Eruption Checklist.pdf (62.7 KB)
This is the first time we’ve used a prematch checklist, throughout comp we did add a few more things to it, but this is what we had originally. We’d have drive team and pit crew sign off on each before every match.
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This is definitely a good start, but as Britt said, you want to be as specific as possible without getting into the weeds too much with what is on your list. That being said, I would take a team that had a checklist like yours over a team with no checklist or just a mental checklist, because in the heat of elims things get forgotten if they arent written down to be referenced.
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One other addition may be to check for tools in the bot.
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I love checklists! My team has some kind of aversion to them sadly
Make sure checking driver station logs by someone who knows what to look for is somewhere in your post match checklist.
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This year we added: Bring OPERATOR CONSOLE to match 
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2023 Carter Preflights.pdf (274.1 KB)
ours is pretty long but we have 1 person handle 1 section and its about 3-4 people attacking the robot making sure everything is all good.
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Keeping the drive team awake may be useful (proven by experience)
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This thread reminded me of a conversation I experienced several years back now. I usually am a field-side volunteer, and thus occasionally help remind drive teams to actually turn on their robot. Here’s my memory of the conversation, though these aren’t exact quotes and may be slightly embellished by the mists of time:
Me, calling out to a couple drive team members walking away from their Robot on the field: “Hey, turn on your robot.”
Drive Team Member 1: “Oh, thanks! We sometimes forget that.”
Me: “Maybe you should have a checklist or something.”
Drive Team Member 2: “Hmm. We have a checklist. It’s on our robot cart.”
Drive Team Member 1 (looking at Member 2): “Maybe we should actually be using the checklist?”
Just a reminder that checklists won’t help you if you don’t actually use them. 
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Ours is split in to 4 sections. We have a pit inspection (robot is off and in pit), functional check (robot is on and in pit), queue checklist and on-field final items. The first two are done under a read-do methodology by the pit staff, while the latter two are do-verify and run by the technician.
A few things I can note about writing these are to be specific (PDH connections - seated, tabs flush vs wiring - check), concise (Pneumatic vent valve - Closed vs make sure the pneumatic vent valve isn’t open) and ordered in a way that makes sense (don’t have battery - secured right before changing the battery!).
As for running them, ours are designed such that the most critical stuff gets caught once relatively early and again on the on-field final items. So all the “easy ways to lose a match” like putting in the wrong battery should be avoided. Once a team gets experienced with them, they can be done very fast without reference to the criteria.
Very heavy stealing from the aeronautical world
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As well as drinking water after every match, I remember when I was a driver I would get swept up in the schedule and would end up dehydrated over the weekend. So definitely this.
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keep the emergency gfuel tub in the pit… just in case
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We have a pit check list. It changes year to year. It always includes a general inspection emphasizing known failure and wear points. It ends with a power on function check. Air pressure check. Fresh battery. After that no work on robot without redoing the pit check.
The year we had safety restraints on the robot. Before leaving the field the 2 people setting the robot would hold the up to each other and verify they had all of them.
Attached are Huskie Robotics checklists when in pit, in queue, on field, and post match. These have saved us from numerous on-field failures.
2023 Robot Checklist.pdf (69.3 KB)
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