We’re hitting crunch time now. Time to kick it into high gear before we run out of time… a bunch of late and stressful nights in a row in order to get the robot done before bag and tag…
Wait never mind.
I’d like to express my appreciation to FIRST for eliminating Bag and Tag as we reach this critical time of the build season. Don’t get me wrong, there will still be plenty of late nights and stress for many teams… but the burden can now be spread over at least another week, and for many teams multiple weeks.
The elimination of bag and tag may very well save our season, and will undoubtedly improve the experience of countless other teams. Thanks again to Frank and company for this decision. Here’s to using our extra time effectively so that we can all field the best robots we can this season.
We’re in week 5 right now and I’m freaking out about being ready for our first competition, and that’s without the bag. I can only imagine how stressful things would be if we had to bag this thing
We are working to have a functional robot for the Week 6 scrimmage hosted by our friends on FRC1741. So our build season schedule has remained unchanged.
We expect to use the extra time to get footage for a possible reveal video, continue work on autonomous routines, and get as much drive team practice as possible.
We are further behind than we’ve ever been. We’ve incorporated a slew of new processes in build, controls, cad and business groups and (as expected) the learning curve is steep.
We’ve done essentially a total redesign of the robot when our primary design element didn’t work the way we’d hoped. The robot may drive for the first time this weekend. If it does, driving is the only thing it will do this weekend as we bring up our controls system.
The change of bag day didn’t change much for us - we scheduled a week 1 event intentionally. Any time we ‘gain’ by having no bag day is gained by every other team out there, so being behind is still just as big a problem relative to other teams if you want to compete.
There are a lot of people who sent me angry PMs over the years at my anti-bag stance. I hope they are all enjoying the extra time and making the most of it. I also hope they are able to iterate and improve their robots over the remainder of the season.
Our quickest ever build was 2014, the robot was done early, we almost took the last week of build off We’re almost on that same pace this year So I say, bring back the bag! (joking!)
I think most of us are behind this year due to no bag day. Projects tend to expand to fill the time given!
Even though our team said that we were going to put a hard 6 week limit to our build, sub-consciously we know that we can work beyond and inevitably will to some degree. If we had just 6 weeks, we would be finished in 6 weeks.
I always felt like the time constraints were part of the game that needed to be budgeted carefully.
We are behind, but I think that No Bag Day has allowed us to things “right” rather than just “sufficiently.” We are now making hardware prototypes so that software can easily control stuff, but we are running about four days behind on drivetrain assembly. We have been in crunch time since Day 1, but I love being able to take a day off when I need to. The best part is that I can work on side projects that will help my team in the long run, even though it isn’t immediately necessary. Even though my team is still doing 3-8 hour workdays (similar to our last years schedule), I love being able to promote higher quality production and procedures that create more reliable mechanisms.
By far the weirdest part is that I have nothing to do right now (yay being on software), because most of our prototypes are done with testing, most of the logic is figured out, but we are working on CAD.
Thank you to the entire FIRST team for creating this! It will hopefully have a significant impact on robot quality and reliability.
While was/am anti-bag, I think taking victory laps and declaring removing the bag the right choice after 4 weeks just a little premature…
Since a lot of the concerns over removing the bag centered around a 6 week build turning into a 3 month build and potential for copying successful designs, let’s wait until we see if those are issues or not.
I was expecting our team to behind as well, but we actually finished the robot earlier than usual and have time for cool stuff like LEDs. Another bonus: our programmers actually have time to work on implementing sensors.
I agree you can’t draw definitive conclusions yet, but we can already see a lot of the benefits.
Supplier delays sting less. Shipping costs are down. We lost a whole weekend to an FTC tournament last week and it didn’t completely kill us. I don’t feel like I have to be there every day anymore.
Things are so much calmer… at least for now, I guess.
Just this last meeting we had two students show up because we have 8 total students this year, in addition none of us have been on the team longer than two years so thats always fun.
No bag and tag has taken a bit of pressure off but still.
We are doing less than last year and could still use another week or two. That’s not because of projects expanding to fill the space available, it’s because none of us are going insane this year and I like it this way.
We’re almost on that same pace this year 
So I say, bring back the bag! (joking!)