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Unread 24-01-2017, 15:56
jgerstein jgerstein is offline
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FRC #1257 (Parallel Universe)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Apr 2014
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: United States
Posts: 56
jgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud ofjgerstein has much to be proud of
Re: Inspection Stories

As a mentor:
  • 2011: I had started helping in the late fall. This was the last year of the former lead mentor. We got to the NYC Regional and we were pretty sure our robot was about half an inch too tall. The following conversation happened:
    "Your robot is too tall."
    "How can you tell? It's still in the bag."
    "It's not even close. It's way too tall.
    Turns out our "rules guy" had interpreted 60 inches as 6 feet. I learned a lot from that year, including "everybody needs to know the rules" and "inspect the robot before the end of build season". We never would have touched the field that year if it hadn't been for 1626's help.
  • 2014?: As you can probably guess based on 2011, we had been struggling. One of our goals this year was to not be getting inspected in a huge rush right before opening ceremonies. We had the robot ready to go, with just enough time to go get inspected and queue up for our last scheduled practice match. The inspection took nearly two hours (on an extremely simple robot), and the inspector never did find anything wrong. He was quizzing the students on just about every component of the robot. This experience was part of what motivated me to start volunteering to do inspections.
  • 2015: We got through inspection with no issues, but at our second competition our pit was next to a team we usually wouldn't have been near, and they were having an even more challenging year than we did in 2011. All their components (except wiring) were legal, but they were going to fail inspection in a variety of ways, including size. We worked with them to get their robot legal (and after their first match, even to get it working). One of the inspectors stayed nearby and inspected as things got fixed, and one of the last problems we realized was that their frame didn't fit the transport size requirements. The inspector and one of the other mentors were discussing with the other team ways of cutting and reassembling the frame, but we found a simpler method - we flipped it on its side. It fit, and the robot was already on its way to the field before the inspection paperwork was even signed.

As an inspector:
  • Teams that have no idea what the relevant rules for their robot are
  • Not really related to the robot itself, but amusing: after telling a mentor of another team that they needed to fix the way their bumpers were mounted (and helping them figure out how to do so), the mentor was grumbling to another mentor of my team that "your safety captain just failed our robot". I was 31.
  • I convinced a team that was finishing their second district event that they needed to bag up their robot in case they got a slot at DCMP. They thought I was out of my mind, but did it anyway. Next weekend, I got to inspect them at DCMP.
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