My team has a constant issue of building for so long that the programmer and driver get little time with the robot. How much does it take other teams to make a fully functional robot?
my current robot has so far taken me about 35 hours. It was a rushed build.
This is a very common problem for most teams, my biggest advice would be to build a little bit simpler mechanisms. This is something I especially struggle with. You need to evaluate your time to decide what is most worth it. As far as time it takes to make a robot it greatly varies based on experience and the complexity of the robot. Just look at the robot in 3 days videos. Our robot is very complex right now so it has taken I would guess about 50-60 hours. When the robot was first functional I would say about 30-40 hours though CAD greatly sped up the process for us.
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That is normal. We have spent something like 60-70 hours on the robot so far and we have about 10 hours of work left before full-time programming can begin. I certainly think that bigger teams can build faster but in our experience, with two team members and a coach, building a very complex robot with many ratcheting mechanisms that have to completely mesh with one another, it is normal to spend a significant amount of time building.
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Have the programmer work on something else in the meantime, like, make a second chassis and start them working on pos tracking
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A problem programmers will normally deal with is a lack of time with the physical robot. This is ok though as programs can be written for the most part without a fully completed robot. If you know how you want the robot to function, you can work the logic needed to make it happen. And with the grunt work out of the way before you even touch the robot, you can spend your 10 hours or so on debugging and tuning.
For example if you know the wheel size and gear ratios, you can figure out the rough distance the robot needs to travel in auto without the actual robot (circumference times rotations equals distance travelled).
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Our team spends a lot of time building. Your building can take less time if you have a specific goal of what you are doing before you start building something. Mechanisms can be complex, but you need to know and think through what you are doing. Our original robot was not that good. After rebuilding various elements of it, we are finally looking decent. If the programmer has other drive codes from past seasons, they can look at those codes and try to write driver code that should be mostly operational when the robot is done.
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With our 3rd rebuild in 4 comps building time for us is about 3 weeks max. Except the one we are building now. That’s been a while
We have spent 4 months building our robot. Adds up to around 40 hours? And around 99% building, 1% testing.
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I don’t have actual numbers, but I can say that 90% of our time is spent building. which isn’t ideal, I’d love to have more time to program and practice driving.
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I don’t count total hours put into a bot but, I do log weekly hours. I put in 10+ hours a week during a week with no comp and somewhere around 15 a week when we do have a comp into our bot. That includes practice and building but not coding.
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This must be a sign of something but we only get around 3 hours a week…
Our team spends over 40 hours working on our robot, but we always have enough time left to practice, code, and make an aton. We think our building is relatively quick because I cad the robot and we plan right after the game is released. So we do not come across many problems along the build path. We get around 9 hours a week to work on our robot also.
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I spend usually 3 hours a day working on the robot and then an extra two hours twice a week when we have after school meeting.
I am the only programmer on a team of 8 people, and I have almost no time to test code. Today is the last time we are meeting before competition, and I have not tested the code yet.
try to talk to them and if they don’t care, just code drive and thats it and a 1 point auton. If you need help PM me
While I was a junior I would spend roughly 50-60 hours a week, but this year is a bit complicated as my loads are moving to other things that are important for me:
Now that I’m a part of another team, I don’t have to stress much and work is distributed. (6-12 hours/week, or 1-2 hours a day to build the robot with the team)
I’m trying to make a game to hopefully earn profit that can pay for some of my college expenses (40-50 hours/week, or 7 hours a day)
Sleep (42 hours a week, or 6 hours a day. Yes, quite a bit unhealthy but it was worse last year)
School (8 hours a day on weekdays, so 40 hours a week)
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That’s like 8 hours per day!? I’m jealous now 
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