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Unread 02-05-2012, 22:22
Marc S.'s Avatar
Marc S. Marc S. is offline
Read the Manual! PLEASE!
AKA: Adversity
FRC #3925 (Robotics)
Team Role: College Student
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Santa Barbara, Ca
Posts: 302
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Re: 2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

About the Q&A system...

FIRST needs to answer all questions even if they are design specific. The ONLY reason a team would ask a design specific question is because they don't know whether or not their design is legal. No team should ever have to build part of their robot (or even worse their whole robot) wondering if it is going to be ruled legal or illegal at their first event.

This year 973 was debating doing something similar to the '118' style hang off the bridge. We considered this because there was not a definition to the 'Grab, Grasp, Grapple' rule in the manual. When we looked up definitions for grab, grasp, and grapple we found multiples of each, and most of them classified 118's hanging mechanism legal. Even most of the definitions for grapple don't classify a grappling hook as something that grapples. Because of this we thought we needed clarification by the Q&A. After they failed to answer our initial question, we submitted 3 question: (1) Please define Grab. (2) Please define Grasp. (3) Please define Grapple.

The answers they gave were mediocre: "If a reasonably astute observer would define something as (insert one of the G's) then it is (that same G).

The problem with this is that 'reasonably astute observers' don't always define stuff the same. So essentially they were saying that at some events the 118 style hang is legal... and at some, it is not. This is not only unfair it degrades the image of FIRST. (It also makes for some very frustrated designers in the middle of build season.)


There's also the bridge thing, where FIRST defined the bridge as everything in the bridge assembly picture (including the ball deflector), twice in week 2 of build (which even I thought was strange cause the first thing I thought of was, hey if we go under the bridge then we're still supported by it and we still get points for it). Then in week 6 they redefined the bridge as only the moving/balancing part. So essentially this told me that, the answers in the FIRST Q&A are not official and we should not make design decisions based on Q&A answers. Again this degrades FIRST's image, and can potentially ruin a teams' season.

/end Q&A rant
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Alumnus FRC 973: 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013
2011 World Championship Winning Alliance Member

FLL Mentor and Competition Judge 2012-2015
Student-Mentor FRC 5102: 2014, 2015
Student-Mentor FRC 3925: 2015, 2016

FRC Ventura Regional Planning Committee Member & Regional Field Supervisor: 2015, 2016

Last edited by Marc S. : 02-05-2012 at 22:55.
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