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Originally Posted by Paul Copioli
First, I would like say team 217 will be strictly following the rules. Even if our practice robot breaks we will not fix it unless we are within the fix it windows(that's basically what the rules say, right?).
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Well, more accurately, if the spare/replacement (for the real robot) parts on the practice bot break, you may not repair them outside of the fix-it window, if you still want to use them as spares/replacements.
Actually, I'm in general agreement with Paul, Jack and others; I don't really see the benefit derived from being so dogmatic about the post-competition fix-it windows. That said, we've got to try to make sense of it all, and to try to adhere to it.
On a related note, I'm not sure what to make of those two Q&As that Karthik listed. On one hand, the first one doesn't even answer the question fully—are we to take that to mean that further development of prototypes is allowed, so long as they don't become actual robot parts, or spares or replacements for actual parts. That's seemingly what they're saying (and I realize that I'm on the tenuous ground of interpreting their non-answers to mean that something is not forbidden—but precedent would seem to support this interpretation).
On the other hand, reading the second one alongside the first seems (at first glance) to imply a double standard for hardware and software, where
non-competition code is likened to
competition parts. This really doesn't make any sense. Since <R17> doesn't in any way limit non-competition robots ("their robot" must, by context, mean their competition robot), their analogy is broken. Since they (in the Q&A) refer to the "final product"—the competition robot—I can only assume that they are only restricting software development for competition code, and that development of practice code, so long as none of it is copied electronically to the competition code, is legal. It's a little unclear as well, because the question referred to
practice robots, while it seems (thanks to the reference to the "final product") that the answer concerns
competition robots.