Hi all. Here is a quick question of the week…
What and how will your team prototype different parts of the robot, at different time during the 6 weeks?
QUESTION 12/02/01: Prototyping is really important to test ideas out, and I’ve seen a few different teams using various materials for different degree of prototyping. So, I am just curious how other teams do this and what advices can you give to rookie teams about this whole process?
Have fun,
-Ken Leung
P.S. I am open to suggestions of any questions you want as the “QUESTION OF THE WEEK!!!”… So e-mail me at [email protected] and show me what you got… 
Prototyping is probably the most important thing a first year team can do… Start as early as possibe, and don’t expect to figure everything out at once… Speaking from the electrical point of view, a good way to start out is diagraming circuits and understanding power flow, etc., etc., before actually hooking up speed controllers and the likes…
That’s about all the advice I have right now, hope it helps…
For last year’s game, our team prototyped parts of the robot (most notably the robot’s arm) with some cheap wood we had lying around. Once we were satisifed with how everything was working, we went to the aluminium. This worked pretty well because it gave the people working on the drive train and electrical systems time to build and debug their systems in parallel with the arm people.
On a more comical side: One team member had a few too many K’Nex on his hands, so he buit a little mock up of the planned robot, and the goal. That was a riot!