Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Hello FRC Community!

Spotlight is back with our second episode on Tuesday, January 5th at 8:30PM EST.

Our guest is a man who's quest for corndogs and cheesecake is never ending!



FRC Director Frank Merrick will be joining us to tell his journey of FIRST and to answer your questions live on the air!

Post your questions on this page. It could be anything about Frank, FIRST, or various food items! Please keep in mind that there will be some areas that Frank will not be able to discuss such as the 2016 game.

If you would like to watch live on the 5th at 8:30PM EST, please go to our Twitch channel.

Can't watch live? View it on our YouTube channel, or listen through iTunes, SoundCloud, or RSS.

Hope to see everybody in Chat Nation on the 5th!

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Very cool, an AMAA with Frank!


Frank - What is the #1 administrative change you'd like to see happen to FRC over the next 5 years?

Thanks!

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Frank- How does FIRST test games for spectator friendly-ness and design? Are practice and demo robots made to test out the games?

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Frank-What on earth is wrong with Hawaiian pizza? (On a related note: what is your favorite type of pizza?)

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Who is your favorite FRC mentor; and as a follow-up, why is it Andy Baker? :D

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Chute door.

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

What is your favorite FRC game? Also, what's your favorite FIRST game? Think you could give a shout out to the Lunatecs?:yikes:

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

What are the components of making a good game? What are the GDC's goals at the start of the process?

Which COTS item from the last 3-5 years do you think has had the greatest impact in FRC? What do you think the next big COTS product will be?

Also what is your favorite restaurant in Manchester and why is it the Airport Diner?

What Is your favorite regional experience?

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Frank - Will we get a(nother) game hint before the season starts?

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

I was lucky enough to meet one of the engineers at AndyMark who was on the FTC GDC and talked about how their missions get designed, which was REALLY interesting.
Who makes up the GDC? How does the GDC create and decide on missions/a game? Is the FRC GDC similar to the FTC GDC in that they come up with a few ideas/tasks for missions and let the engineers come up with a few designs that are easy to build with COTS parts and then come back to present them and the GDC decides on which ones to go with?

Where do you think FRC/FIRST will be at in 5 years? 10 years?

What will be the biggest positive (& negative - if any) change for teams this year (like how FTC switched control systems)?

I also know that you previously mentioned something about testing a format for webcasts at IRI this past year. Will webcasts be standardized this year with support from FRC? (I'm partially asking this since my regional asked me to help out with webcasting and I pointed them to a local video production company.)

Keep up the great work Frank!

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

To follow up on this - what about bandwidth constrained/prohibitively expensive venues like NYC? Apparently from what I understand they barely have enough to support FMS, let alone live webcast (probably due to venue charges more than infrastructure). Is there funding to support this?

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Hello everybody!

Thank you for all the great questions! We will continue accepting questions for Frank through Monday so keep them coming :)!

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

Another question: what is holding us back from having a full field camera set up at each event to post match videos after events? It's 2016 and I feel like it should be easily doable to get every match on YouTube.

Re: Live AMAA with FRC Director Frank Merrick on 1/5 @ 8:30pm EST on Spotlight!
 

What was your first FIRST experience?