|
Re: Inspection Stories
This has already been said in a few places in this thread but just to reiterate. We need more experience mentors and volunteers to come be inspectors. Experience can dramatically speed up inspections. There isn't a lot I haven't seen so I can go through a robot and find any trouble areas a lot quicker than someone I had to train Thursday morning who is at their 1st FRC event. We'd love to never have to use completely new people but if we don't get enough volunteers that's what happens.
Another note, a lot of these stories could have had a happier ending if teams went and talked to the LRI earlier. If an inspector is taking 45 mins to an hour and hasn't told you anything is wrong, send someone to find the LRI and at least let them know it's going slowly. None of the events I have ever worked could afford to have inspectors taking that long on a single robot.
Inspection Stories
- Illegal motors every years - FTC, Globe, linear actuators, different window motors than what used to be allowed.
- All green wire on the robot, like not green and black just all green wire, almost everywhere on the robot.
- Modified pneumatics parts, including paint and stickers on air tanks and cylinders.
- modified electronics - a team modified the PDP to use larger ATC fuses where the small 10A and 20A fuses go by cutting away parts of the plastic housing. Have also seen a couple cRIOs that had holes drilled in them.
- Crazy bumper builds - weirdly heavy bumpers that ended up having steel plates between the plywood and noodles. Also have seen really light bumpers that were made with 1/4" wood before. Last year I saw 8" tall bumpers that used closed cell foam instead of pool noodles.
- Team using previous year's welded frame as part of their robot.
- Team trying to swap entire robots on their alliance with a practice chassis they built previously
- 150+lb robot without bumpers or battery. They had just a massive amount of solid aluminum on their robot like 2in x 2in cubes of it.
- A robot that was 20+ inches outside of the sizing constraint. It looked more like a go cart than an FRC robot.
__________________
Team 647 | Cyber Wolf Corps | Alumni | 2003-2006 | Shoemaker HS
Team 2587 | DiscoBots | Mentor | 2008-2011 | Rice University / Houston Food Bank
Team 3847 | Spectrum | Coach | 2012-20... | St Agnes Academy
LRI | Alamo Regional | 2014-20... "Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off." - Franklin D. Roosevelt
|