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Please...no more steenkin' light!
A few years ago, FIRST inflicted us with a high tech solution to making it easy to identify alliances, the stinkin' light.
This year, much controversy pertained to the placement of the light. Despite the rules, many teams embedded their light inside their robot, making it hard to see from the stands and invalidating the purpose for the light.
Many other teams followed the letter of the rule and had a more visible, and vulnerable, light. Our light, for instance, was almost completely demolished by the end of the competition season. The poor thing is held together by super-glue, duct tape, and tie wraps.
The problems with the light are many. It is heavy. It is bulky and tall. In competitions where you have a low constraint of 14", the light may reduce your height constraint to 10" or lower. It consumes precious power and an extra relay. It requires effort to mount and wire it. The light is a very high tech, resource intensive solution to a simple problem.
Many teams solved this same problem (robot identification and visibility) more effectively this year by putting a whip antenna flag on their bot.
So my proposal is, why doesn't FIRST require us to use a flag instead of a steenkin' light?
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