Quote:
Originally Posted by Ginger Power
I'm glad to see that FIRST decided to do something about the low bar fabric. It was rough at Lake Superior. We had our very own sweatshop on the side of the field cranking out new low bar covers as fast as poorly designed robots could rip them up.
I wish FIRST would've followed Lake Superior's lead and gone with colored flaps made out of bumper material (if the bumper material needs to be rugged enough for the game, you'd think the low bar flap material would be held to the same standard).
A lot of this comes back to good inspecting as well. Robot Inspectors need to be on the lookout for anything that has even the slightest possibility of tearing the low bar fabric. I know I passed a robot that shredded a flap. I felt terrible. I walked the team back to their pit, and we came up with a solution that served it's purpose well for the rest of the event.
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Honestly, this is what I see it coming down to more than anything. R8 is there to prevent exactly the sort of tears that have been happening. Prudent inspection and a slightly tougher fabric (1000D Cordura or maybe ballistic nylon) seem likely to mitigate many of the issues experienced with the flaps, without penalizing teams for spending time to design around a now-deprecated field feature.