[cptjeff]

I had an idea for the game pieces. Not anything more really.

FIRST has done big and awkward, how about something small and irregular? something that requires a lot of fine control- Like a hockey puck. If you think about it, it's perfect. They can be ordered in bulk, they're cheap (a dollar each) , which was a complaint about the track balls this year. for the price of one trackball, you can get 100 pucks, probably more then enough.

You can also get them with screening- so you could have red faced pucks and blue faced pucks, or green vision pucks...

The only drawback I could see is that a human player throwing one could be a little more dangerous then foam balls or such. Or a robot shooting them. but you could design a game where shooting them would not help at all.

Also, they have an irregular shape- can't just build a roller based system like many teams did in 2006. Or perhaps you can. But it would probably require a little more work.

A few ideas on how you could design a game: Have a ramp that the robot has to drive up to dump the pucks into a slot- which then feeds them back to a human player via a ramp.

Or have puck dispensers that dispense pucks at different times in the game- for fun you could set them to randomize- and teams have to gather the most pucks and set them in them to movable platforms on the field- think a 4 ft hexagon with a bucket in the middle. This adds a defensive aspect as well- you can move the goal away from your opponent, they can move it towards another robot on their alliance, so on and so forth.

The electronic scoring could be simple too- a little scale to weigh how many pucks are in each bucket. divide by the weight of a puck, voila!


So there's your conglomeration of random thoughts on hockey pucks in FIRST.

and one more thing- a puck with a FIRST logo would be a great souvenir of a tournament for anybody...