[Kims Robot]

I think most of my issues that should be worked on are here, but I will reiterate a few, and add a few here.

1. Consistancy of penalties (especially within regionals... nevermind even between regionals). There were several calls that I saw made that were not made in a previous match, or on a previous day, and this made it hard for teams to keep their cool.

2. Announce the penalties!! It was impossible for people who were not in the game or on the field to tell what the penalties were for or who got them. This is important for people just coming in to watch the competition, as well as for scouting.

3. Consistancy of inspections. At Buckeye, they tried to force us to have a "safety inspection" which was 3/4 of the real inspection, before we were even allowed to go out on thursday to practice. This is absurd and not in the rules. You better bet I argued my way out of that one! And a smaller one is to have the inspectors actually read THIS years rules... we had an inspector in Atlanta try to fail us because he said we could not put a 40Amp breaker on a window motor(10AWG on a speed controller). Rule 83 specifically states that any breaker can be used with any motor... it allows teams to do their own engineering. I know in the past that was true, but it wasnt THIS year. ::sigh::

4. More exits at the final social event. I get the one entrance thing... but the exit was as far from our hotel as it could be, and got incredibly congested. They could have allowed teams to exit through other locations. We went to one spot where we just saw 5 members of another team exit, and a cop got all huffy with us and said it wasnt an exit (despite the fact that we had just watched another team walk through there).

5. Better organization of the FLL shadowing at the championships. There were a lot of teams that wanted to offer to have an FLL team shadow them, but with no coordination (mentors had to email FLL teams to see if they wanted shadowing), and a very late notification, many of us were unable to help out.

That brings me to my final and largest suggestion:
6. FIRST needs to create a forum where THEY can ASK for help. Anything that they have trouble getting done, I am certain that there are many of us out here that would be willing to help... if we only knew they needed the help (with enough notice). It could be as simple as sending an email to all of the team leaders when they come across something they need help with, or something a little more like the Q&A or TIMS where certain people can sign in and look at the needs that FIRST has. We would have taken on the organization of the FLL thing, but didnt have a clue it was needed until too late.

*edit* Oh yeah and I was reminded by another post...
7. Bring back Robot stop buttons... make sure every team has a disable button, and disable buttons are easily accessible to refs. In toronto, a robot threw a tetra at our drivers, and was not disabled until 30 seconds later, when the ref pulled their human player off the pad. At our scrimmage, we had two people with three shut off switches (one for each team) watching each allaince, and if there were any times that safety came into question, they were to shut the robot off immediately. (matches can be rerun, people take much longer to be fixed!)