Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Kressly
I imagined that the 40 pound allowance might cause a few issues getting into an event and because of that we shipped the robot and controls in the crate. However, this is not something I anticipated at all. I hope there's time for folks to revisit this one.
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This is an understatement and I am really glad that Oregon is not a first week regional this year. This will have to be fixed.
I also can only imagine the lines of teams trying to get in on Thursday morning while everything they bring in is checked... Imagine standing in line waiting to have your stuff weighed as it is brought in... If you are lucky you will be first in line... and have 59 other teams waiting behind you... at 1 minute per team that will take an hour... with two weigh stations it would be 30 minutes.....minimum... and that is based on 1 minute per team which will never happen.
I would hope that we are allowed to act as gracious professionals and police ourselves...
By the way, yes assumptions were made... but there have only been a few years when the batteries had to be in the crate.
The question to ask here is this:
We were encouraged to keep our control systems at home to work with them.
How were we supposed to use them without batteries?
One of the major points of the COTS and other rules from the past are to ship the whole robot... and not keep assemblies...however the rule this year didn't specify what we could keep. If the GDC had wanted ONLY the control system retained (and that was the purpose of the 40 lb rule..) because it was new... then it could have simply stated that..
Frankly i am getting pretty tired of trying to guess why a rule was instituted.
I have worked with federal regulations my whole life and intent was specified in a separate document along with the process of why the rules were made and what they were supposed to cover. If we understand the intent of a rule... we can design and specify systems to comply...
It seems that we are having to guess at the intent of rules this year.
In the past, many, many teams have been outside the allowed rules if we are now saying that the rule has always said that batteries with cables attached were not allowed to be brought in to the venue with the team.
I guess that in the end, my question to the GDC would be:
What is the purpose of making us reassemble our battery cables at an event?
Everyone has batteries... Everyone has to use them during the build season...
Why should we have to purchase more cable and connectors?
To say that you have to because its "in the rules" is a cop out..
We will see what happens tonight in the update.