Thank you for all the well thought out replies. I'll admit the "cursory" wording was stretching things a bit. My primary concern was with the appearance of bias in this post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by IndySam
The bumpers are intended for protection and identification. I don't much like when teams start stretching the rules for some tactical advantage.
Pay heed if I am inspecting (or many other inspectors I know) your robot and you are lawyering or stretching the rules you better have a perfect robot in every other respect because you are going to get the most thorough inspection ever.
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It seems like the opposite of the effect dtengineering is pointing out. An inspector notices something that rubs him the wrong way, and suddenly he's expecting to find other things wrong and is looking in much more detail for anything, however small, that might be out of spec. Or atleast that's the way that reads to me.
I ascribe to the philosophy that the inspectors are there to verify that teams are legal to compete and help teams get legal if they're not. Comments like the above don't really fit that notion and cast inspection as an adversarial process with teams trying to get away with whatever they can and inspectors trying to catch them at it. Which leads to unnecessary conflict, stress, and nitpicking interpretations of the rules.
For instance, we had an inspector once that wouldn't take our word that our home depot 12ga THHN wire was 12ga. He declared it felt too thin and wanted to see the labelling buried in our robot. After snipping a sample from our spare wire he declared it the thinnest 12ga he's ever seen. He then went on to criticize our abbreviation of our school name BTW-HSEP, declaring it could mean "By The Way, He Sucks Early Peaches". And when we started writing the full name in smaller letters (Booker T Washington and the High School for the Engineering Professions), he declared that it was neither proud nor prominent. At which point I flipped the sign over and scribbled the name on the back just to make him happy and get my kids on the field. This kind of madness and stress is what comes of couching inspection as an adversarial process. Bayou addressed the issue when we filed a complaint, to their credit, but I'd really rather it hadn't happened in the first place.