FRC booK behind the design
 

Does anyone here wish that FIRST would of kept going with the books that they made for 2006 and 2007 season, that had the team that had won certain engineering awards, and they showed what the teams did and thier process

I wish FIRST could start that again, i really enjoyed the books. Does anyone know why they stop

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

I think enough copies weren't purchased to make a profit. I personally found them very interesting and helpful.

-Nick

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

I am pretty sure the issue is someone needs to step up and do it. It is a huge amount of work and the authors of the previous efforts are super busy with other things.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

It is a huge amount of effort. I'll poke the guy and see if I can get an update.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Here is what the Author, Vince Wilczynski, said in 2008:

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

As nice as glossy printed books are, maybe it it time to transition to an e-book. That removes this issue. Low cost of production, high accessibility of information.

In order to help move the process along, maybe the author becomes more of an editor. Teams can submit, or be invited to submit, high resolution photos and a substantial written narrative.

The editors can pick which submissions will make the final copy, and re-write the narratives to align it with the production standards.

Maybe Vince could be convinced to be Editor-In-Chief, and he can direct a team of editors to manage the process ?

The e-book could have a standard template format for the whole production, and a template for a 1/2, 1 or 2 page team spread that focuses on a the teams effective design or strategy.

The teams could submit a design or be invited to submit a design. It doesn't necessarily need to be a winning design but an effective design with merit. In other words there needs to be some editorial rigor to the process and not just a collection of not too useful information.

I'm game.

2 cents.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Count me in, too!

We have a great photography and writing team, and would be happy to assist. We have also published a couple of children's books, and are in the process of converting to e-books, so see that would be a great avenue for the behind the design series.

Just my 2.71828... cents.

Steve

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

FRC Designs launched Behind the Design before Summer 2012! We always welcome editors to email me with submissions to the site. Check it out!

http://frc-designs.com/btd.html

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Steve,

Send me an email and we can get started! Looking forward to it!

Matt

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

I suggest FRC Designs launched Behind the Design and the e-book complement each other.

The e-book can be an electronic 'coffee table' e-book. The website can then have information in depth, and more....

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

I'd love to see something similar in concept to http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html — but with teams and designs, rather than open source projects.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

We (2338) own both books (at least 2006...). We often refer back to them for inspiration throughout the build season.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Still bummed 116 couldn't submit in 2007. We only attended one regional, and ended up with a Judge's Award for both our robot and outreach efforts, rather than a technical award so we weren't eligible to submit. :(

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

I would love to have that robot on FRC Designs! Send me an email and we'll see what we can do to put you on FRC Designs: Behind the Design!

Matt

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

The quality of the submissions is the important factor in success of a project like this. The books were awesome because teams took some time to provide good raw material, and Vince & Stephanie took the time to polish up some fantastic final chapters.

It is easy to say "we should do this! We'll post it on XXXX site!" but without the quality articles, this is just talk.

How many teams take the time to create a submission worthy description of their robot and publish it? Overall system details? Details of subsystems? Documentation of iterations? Post-Mortem Analysis?

This is a very chicken/egg discussion in my book...

-John

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Very true, not alot of team do that, but those that actaully do are the best and it amazing how they do it and come up with the best and great looking robots. especially when breaking down thier system and sub systems

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Very true. And this one thing is probably the #1 risk factor. I'm not wildly optimistic about success. But we should press on and give it a whirl !! Maybe it will happen.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

John,

You stated perfectly what I have been thinking. From a CD discussion during the 2012 build season, I decided to launch FRC Designs: Behind the Design (http://www.frc-designs.com/btd.html). This portion of the site was meant to be an online version of the texts to give inspiration to teams. Is this what people/teams are looking for?

Since the launch of this portion of the site (June 2012), I have had one submission.

Could I promote the site more? Probably.
Could I do a better job at asking teams to submit? Maybe.

As you said, there is a lot of agreement among people that it should be done. But, there is not a lot of follow-up to the discussion.

I am here, available, and am more than willing to publish the information. I just need the help from people/teams.

Matt

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Unfortunately, being unofficial (i.e. not an official FRC award) and not actually publishing the submissions in a book detracts from the prestige that attracts people to submit. Perhaps those interested could fund the book through a Kickstarter campaign?

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Matt,

Honestly if anything, spamming people and hounding them is the worst approach.

IMO, the best approach would be probably to create an "E-book". Then either have an open or private invite of teams/robots. It would require people ,like JVN stated above, that could take information and present it well.

-RC

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

The books are amazing souvenirs and gifts. There is something about the physical book, however, that sets it apart from an e-book.

Perhaps most significantly, however, what makes the Behind the Designs books awesome was the editing and layout.

I'm not sure that kind of effort is available on a volunteer basis... but, on the other hand... wikipedia exists, so I may be underestimating the awesomeness of volunteer editors and writers.

It may also be possible to combine an e-book with a limited edition print run. It may also be possible that as the number of teams has grown, so has the potential market.

I'd probably buy a hard copy... and I'm not even building FRC bots any more.

Jason

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Or is there another way to renew the prestige? Might FIRST be convinced to get behind it again somehow? Even if it's just adding it to the MC's speech when they announce technical awards or offering some other endorsement. A popular, high-quality, well-used resource like this would still be good publicity for FIRST and great practice and publicity for the teams, even if it's not actually published in hard copy. I bet you could also get STEM magazines to run articles about it if that could help with prestige. (We've gotten covers before for things not nearly as large as this could be.) Have you [[EDIT: Sorry, Starke, not DampRobot]] talked to FIRST at all about this?

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

Basically you have a great idea called 'incentivizing the team to make a submission'.

Let's try this idea.

Invite teams to make a quality submission to the editors. The top ten or so entries are then handed to traditional magazine editors. The magazine editors might then consider covering the design at the Championship for publication.

Several things will happen. 1) the e-book editors and the FRC design website gets content, 2) The magazine gets content, 3) FIRST gets coverage, 4) the submitting team gets coverage.

As an example, consider this article for Popular Mechanics

There were some print articles with teams in them last spring that had projects related to the FIRST Future Inventors Award. The is no reason not to cover interesting FRC robotics.

Nothing like a little incentive to get things done.

Re: FRC booK behind the design
 

FIRST's "Behind the Design" will be returning.

Earlier this year, we ran it through official FIRST channels and got approval to begin work on a new "Behind the Design". We used a few simple metrics to invite a number of teams to submit. Unfortunately, we've only received a small number of submittals from the teams who originally were interested in participating.

We still intend to publish this year in some manner, though I suspect it may end up being a free document due to the amount of content. We originally were going to charge a nominal fee and donate the proceeds to charity under the participating team's names. (E-book format, published through all the normal outlets).

I believe our struggles on this are our fault in the way we went about gauging interest. Instead of putting out feelers asking which teams would be interested to the entire FIRST community, we went after a select group of very competitive teams who are also quite busy during the summer. I believe we'll fix that issues in volume two next year. It's better to have too much content rather than too little. So next year we'll ask teams FIRST-wide for submissions, then pick those that go into the publication.

As for a very abridged volume one, expect it out later this year. It will return next year, bigger and better. I suspect we'll be looking for guest editors as well, because if submissions are open to the whole community I'm betting we get a "large" response.