Competition preparation checklist

Competition days go wrong in predictable ways. Almost all of them are preventable in the three weeks before the event rather than on the morning.

Three weeks out: roles

• Every team member has a named role and a backup for someone else's.
• One person owns the rulebook and has actually read the scoring table.
• Someone is responsible for the engineering notebook or documentation, if the event requires one.
• Decide who talks to judges, and let them practise saying what the robot does.

Two weeks out: the robot

• Measure against the size limit with the robot in its largest configuration.
• Weigh it, with the battery in.
• Check every rule about banned parts and modifications. Inspection is not the moment to discover one.
• Photograph the wiring while it is tidy, so you can rebuild it after a failure.

One week out: practise failure

Deliberately break the robot and repair it against a clock. Pull a connector, swap a motor, reflash the controller. The team that has done this three times behaves completely differently when it happens for real.

• Time a full battery swap.
• Practise on an unfamiliar surface: a different floor, different lighting.
• Run the autonomous routine after moving the robot's starting position by a few centimetres.

The packing list

• Every battery you own, charged, plus the charger and a power bar.
• Spare motors, wheels, connectors and fasteners: the parts that fail, not the parts that are expensive.
• The tools used to build it, not a generic tool kit.
• A laptop with the working code already on it, plus a copy on something that is not that laptop.
• Cable ties, tape and a marker. These solve more competition-day problems than anything else in the box.

On the day

1. 01Recalibrate sensors on the actual field before your first match.
2. 02Do a full systems check between every match, not only after a failure.
3. 03Write down what went wrong each round. Memory is unreliable by round four.
4. 04Fix one thing at a time between matches. Two changes at once and you learn nothing from the result.