My two teams have been attending a week 0 event for 5 years now. This event is hosted by Team 3102 of Nevis MN. It is SOOOOOOOOOO valuable! I spent most of the day in the pits working with the kids on our robots. Now we know what needs to change before our first event. I am sure if not for week 0 we would be spending most of the first day of our regional frantically trying to work the bugs out.
Take aways although I did not see many matches… out of ~20 teams
Several were attempting to climb, less than 1/2 could do so reasonably well.
lots of shooter bots. I would say 3-4 have it mostly dialed in.
Mostly taller robots.
Several teams made very few or no appearances on the field but chose to work on their robots with the assistance of other teams.
I saw very few wheel manipulators
Teams may be a bit behind the typical build season schedule
Big thanks to 3102, I know it is a ton of work but we all appreciate it!
My team goes to the Week 0 hosted by Lee’s Summit, 1730 Team Driven by their generous invite! I agree, it is beyond useful.
A theme I’m starting to see is that a lot of people are behind their schedule and are having to really push it these last few days/weeks. There was a low turnout for the 1730 Week 0 from what I was told, but it does vary year to year. It seems a lot of teams are taking the college try of procrastinating a bit then scrambling a bit more towards the end whether it was intended or not.
I have seen that too. Right now we are fixing the little things we would normally do after unbagging on Thursday, so it’s been useful for us, but I think most teams will just be pushing their work load back and come to competition in a similar state to what they would have had last year.
1511 hosts our local week zero, and we’ve never gone and regretted it. They’re awesome, and the opportunity to work kinks out on an actual field with other robots on it and a time limit is irreplaceable.
Today we found some jamming issues on our intake are worse than we thought, and because our local FTA and LRI are freaking awesomesaucetacular they helped us track down and eliminate code problems we didn’t realize we had that were bogging down our CAN bus in ways that might have been a season-long bugbear we wouldn’t even know was a code issue (because on our own we thought it was hardware.)