[WizenedEE]

Hello,
Our team was planning on doing some sort of decorative light that would be on/flashing/whatever while the robot is disabled (ie it would be controlled by an external device or hooked directly up to the PD board). However, it seems that this year they are illegal. [R50] states: "All electrical loads (motors, actuators, compressors, electric solenoids) must be supplied by an approved power regulating device" Obviously, a light is an electrical load, so it has to be switched by a jaguar, spike, victor, or vex motor controller -- each one of these turned off by the cRIO FPGA while disabled.

Since the wording of the rule is similar to how it was last year, and I know that many teams had lights on their robot last year, I asked on the Q&A, "Are non-function decorations exempt from rule [R50]?" and got the response "No."

I don't see any way around it -- we can't have lights on our robot while disabled. Even if it's legal to use a microcontroller to run the lights, they would still have to go through an approved power regulating device -- thus, we'd need 3 jaguars for an RBG LED.

Also, this rule seems to also apply to other devices. The cRIO and the router are both "electrical loads," so shouldn't we need to put them on a spike?

The only possible way around this that I see is that the parenthesized list of names after "all electrical loads" is defining "electrical loads" rather than giving examples (ie they're using ie instead of eg).

What do you guys think?