[Kevin Sevcik]

I'm pretty sure we moved away from the dome lights because teams were annoyed with them as well. They took up a fairly large chunk of real estate, weren't exactly light, sucked power at a fairly distressing rate, and had interchangeable domes that would get lost and/or broken. In addition, if your robot was shorting, tripping breakers, etc. then the dome light wasn't working, and the field controllers didn't have any idea what color your robot was. I think they were a good solution at the time, but I think light, small, unpowered colored flags are probably better, despite the problems teams had with them this one year. You'll note that most teams didn't have much of a problem with it last year, even though that was the first year we had to do it. I know it was annoying to get a ringer stuck on it this year, but I figure that's not a likely occurance in the future. The GDC does have this annoying habit of completely changing the game from year to year, you know.