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Originally Posted by Kris Verdeyen
And I wouldn't cover that bet. The larger issue here, however, is one of perception. As professionals, we must avoid the appearance of unethical behavior as vigorously as the behavior itself. How must it look to a rookie, or a even struggling veteran team, to see a mentor on a well respected, well staffed, well monied team leave the arena and come back with whatever part he needed? It looks like it could be a violation. It looks shadowy. Even if you stopped the person, and confronted him or her, and got a great explanation complete with footnotes pointing to specific rules, it looks wrong. That's what we need to avoid, and the only way to do that is to limit what we bring to the competition to raw materials and unmodified off-the-shelf hardware.
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(sorry so long for me to respond - was at the Detroit regional watching some great matches)
Kris-
You are simply wrong whe you assume that our competition parts get modified after ship. They don't. If a part gets modified it is no longer a competition part and on our team it doesn't get used during any competition.
Simply having the part on the practice robot is totally within the letter and spirit of the rules.
At Ypsi we had a student totally rebuild a circuit board because the wires were not wrapped after ship - she never got to see one of our lame practices. We resoldered some PWM cables to a switch in a case where the ONLY thing that was not pre-ship was the SOLDER. We follow the rules and it seems our competitors think we follow the rules (thanks for the kind words Andy).
As to the "appearances" complaint, I respectfully disagree with you. I think you are letting the lawyers win when you start nitpicking about appearances in a case where someone has actually followed the rules. FIRST has so many instances where the thing that keeps us within the rules is our own conscience - my guess is they WANT to trust us and want us to trust each other. Its part of the FIRST culture isn't it?
Ken