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Re: Illegal?
If the CCF lamps pose as much danger as everyone here is claiming, then you all should be petitioning FIRST to disallow them and remove them from the KOP.
I don't understand how anyone can claim that they are disallowed for robot use due to safety concerns when FIRST provides them in the KOP and even asks teams to wire them up themselves.
I'm not trying to argue whether they're dangerous or not - all I'm saying is that if people think they are dangerous then there needs to be a rule about it (and that's what you should be working on). Having individual inspectors decide on their own that they don't like CCFs and therefore disallowing them is not the appropriate way to handle this. Think about it in government terms - inspectors are the law enforcement. They are not supposed to make up rules (bad things happen when the police make up their own laws). The GDC is the legislative and judicial branch, so if you think something needs to be a rule then go to them. A quick look at the past year or two with all the complaints of inconsistent reffing and inspecting shows us why it's important to have rule decisions originating from the top (the GDC) rather than the middle or bottom.
Nothing in the 2007 rules that I can see rules out the use of CCFs. The inverter for the CCFs is not a power source (it does not generate power - unplug it from the battery and tell me if you can keep the lights on). Stepping up voltage is not the same as a power source. Many, perhaps most, custom circuits do indeed step up voltage, as nearly every custom circuit I've seen uses an RS-232 driver chip which derives a higher voltage from a 5v supply.
Frankly I think the green lamps used by the camera are a more dangerous situation than CCFs on a robot. Walk through the pits sometime and tell me how many people you see standing on their toes holding up the green lights. Sometimes they're not even covered by the plastic lens. If a CCF breaks on a robot it's more likely to be when the robot is driving, and people usually aren't right next to the robot when it's driving. Again, my point is not that they aren't dangerous, but simply that if they are then a blanket rule should be made and the green lamps should go.
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