bigbeezy
15-03-2008, 21:23
As many of you have already noticed... lots of operator interfaces have been getting knocked to the ground during hybrid period. The same happened to us on Friday.
Basicilly there are 2 ways that FIRST allows teams to prevent this from happening. 1) use the velcro provided at each alliance station. 2) you are allowed to reach forward to catch your controls before they fall to the ground (this we did not know at the time).
We took FIRST's advice and put Velcro under our controls to "prevent" them from falling... this did not work and in one match our station was hit and our controls were thrown to the ground before we even knew what happened. this caused our arm joystick to shatter and we were unable to compete the rest of the match since we couldn't lower our tower.
Now we now clamp our controls down to the table. if it falls with these precautions there is a major problem with teams slamming into the far wall.
Just a word of advice to teams who dont want to worry about their controls breaking.
Basicilly there are 2 ways that FIRST allows teams to prevent this from happening. 1) use the velcro provided at each alliance station. 2) you are allowed to reach forward to catch your controls before they fall to the ground (this we did not know at the time).
We took FIRST's advice and put Velcro under our controls to "prevent" them from falling... this did not work and in one match our station was hit and our controls were thrown to the ground before we even knew what happened. this caused our arm joystick to shatter and we were unable to compete the rest of the match since we couldn't lower our tower.
Now we now clamp our controls down to the table. if it falls with these precautions there is a major problem with teams slamming into the far wall.
Just a word of advice to teams who dont want to worry about their controls breaking.