I’m a mentor for a rookie FRC team, and we’re trying to come up with a better build season calendar with deadlines and major milestones for the team to complete. We are currently trying to do this for each of our sub-teams (mechanical, electrical, software, safety, team leadership) but we are open to changing this if there is a better way to do it.
What deadlines does your team set for build season?
Moving game pieces well with prototype mechanisms by the end of week 2. integrated robot prototype moving game pieces like it’s playing the game, by the end of week 4. Finished robot playing the game at a scrimmage by the end of week 6.
Fixing stuff discovered at said scrimmage, and keeping up with the rest of the teams as the competition season progresses, from week 7 till our last competition. This is going to be different this year for us, with no bag…but it will be “normal” for all the Rookie teams!
Similar. We shoot for but do not always achieve complete mechanical assembly by the end of week three, wired two days later, and basically functioning by the end of week four. The next two weeks are for tweaks/iterations, drive practice, and autonomous programming, with the goal of going to a week zero scrimmage with a functioning and useful robot.
What goals do you set for your programming teams to be able to accomplish this?
What’s really nice is having an electronics testboard or even a drivetrain with electronics board on it. That way programmers can deploy code and test it. As for what needs to be accomplished, it really depends on what your robot needs to do. It is good to have teleop driving done by the end of week 1 and start working on harder subsystems. But most of the programming should be done before the actual robot is complete. At least this is how our team tries to approach the season.
We’re almost ready to hand over the drive base to programming team. We’re just finishing the last of wiring up the control system tonight (we’re late as you can tell) and I’m hoping that will help
That is great. I’m not sure of the strength of your programming team or what programming language they are using, but there is plenty of information on https://docs.wpilib.org/en/latest/ for them to look at when starting out.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most team’s schedules were built around a 6 week build season, but this year there is no limit, just the limit of when your competition is. So these schedules may be sub optimal and subject to change.
Whatever you decide to do for a build seasons schedule just that you’re drive team gets a lot of practice with at the very least the drive base you’re using this year. Assuming you guys are using the kit bot chassis you can get that up and running with minimal work and you can hand it off to your driver to practice driving it Just make sure you drive on a similar surface to the field and you weight the chassis down roughly what you expect your robot to weigh.
Once you start to get mechanisms on the robot keep practicing as much as you can with these with the driver operator, and coach working together. How good the driver and operator are and how the drive team is able to communicate with each other can have a large effect on how the team performs so building these relations as much as possible to make sure they exist at competition is beneficial.
I"m not saying that your drive should be separate from the design/build/programming. All of what i’m saying is independent of where the members come from but if they o happen to come from a sub team who would be working on more stuff for the robot just take them off that for a little bit every so often to have them practice.
They have last year’s robot to use as a test bench, to which we can mount sensors and so forth to give them stuff to work on.
thanks!
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