One of the best parts of this build season so far has had nothing to do with the robot itself being finished — it’s that we didn’t need it to be.
Thanks to YAMS (Yet Another Mechanism System), the tool we helped announce with YASS back at Kickoff, we’ve been able to program and test our mechanisms in simulation while the physical robot is still coming together on the Everybot chassis. That means our programmers aren’t sitting around waiting on the build team to finish a subsystem before they can write and test code for it — they can validate logic, tune values, and catch bugs in simulation first.
It’s a strange feeling to watch your code work correctly on a robot that doesn’t fully exist yet. It’s also exactly the kind of head start we needed after losing time to our Big Dumper pivot. Getting to use a tool we helped build, for our own robot, in the middle of build season crunch, felt pretty good too.