Quote:
Originally Posted by Retired Starman
Part of the value to students in FIRST is learning to design and build a robot to meet specifications as set by our client., which in this case is FIRST. This is how it is done in the "real world" where designers may see much better ways to accomplish a task, but often these "better ways" don't meet the needs of the customer, who has his own reasons for writing the specifications the way he has done.
(I've said for years, that FIRST needs to separate Robot Rules into Rules and Specifications. A rule might be that a team can only enter one robot in the competition. A specification might limit the size, weight, or allowed motors.)
Specifications don't have to make sense to the builders, but they still need to be met. So if FIRST wants all the power to come from one battery, kids build them that way, and we Inspectors inspect them that way.
If you want to change things, don't go picking fights with the Inspectors. Petition FIRST for changes through other less confrontational routes that might be more successful.
And by the way, those super-capacitors better be charged by the one allowed battery when I inspect them!
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I thought about responding to you by picking apart your post piece by piece... believe me, I can. However, at the core of your post is the reason I keep posting rants about outdated rules. You seem content with blindly accepting specifications and rules. Not just content, you want FRC to become about that by forking the manual into specifications for a design.
The problem is that your blind acceptance is the very reason we're able to find loopholes to begin with. If FRC never gets around to explaining why rules are written the way they are or having to clarify the intent because no one questions them then loopholes will be found.
Not only that but most of the engineering that I admire comes from people who examine the specifications closely and find loopholes. The Colin Chapman quote in my signature is there because I admire what Chapman was able to do with pushing the limits of what was thought possible in Formula 1. I teach my students to question everything. It's written in our team handbook that our students can question decisions and ask why or why not. Sometimes the answer is "because that's someone else's poorly written rule and we have to follow it" but at least I give them an answer.
As frustrated as you are as an inspector that has to deal with the shenanigans of a particular team, remember that teams act on the information presented to them. If the manual says custom circuits are legal then custom circuits are legal. Teams can (and I feel rightly that they should) get frustrated when they find a loophole and then have additional restrictions placed on them that weren't written. Obviously there are exceptions for personal safety but when new rules are made up on the spot and applied to a team for pushing the boundaries then it certainly appears to be enforcement of unwritten rules for the sake of not losing an authoritative face. If you explain the intent then it becomes more clear for all involved given the distributed nature of FRC.
And while you might think I'm picking fights with inspectors, remember that FIRST has no official presence on CD so what I post here and how I argue for or against something has no bearing at all on the rules for the game (Unless someone wants to drop the pretense and admit that CD is actually an official forum in some way but that would be another golden cow that gets murdered).