[FRC Blog] Orlando Incident

[Jon Stratis]

It will be interesting to see how we're going to be tracking reinspections. As I'm sure everyone can agree, teams make changes or repairs at competition all the time - the work seems to never stop, and just walking around the pits for 5 minutes shows me at least a dozen teams who are doing something that needs reinspection - and an hour later, it'll be a different dozen! This poses some interesting paperwork issues, in that we'll possibly be generating a lot of additional paper to keep track of it!

I know at my regionals, I have inspectors stationed at 3 spots Friday and Saturday - in the queueing line, at the field, and at the inspection station. This means teams can get reinspected when they ask, AND that every team gets a small reinspection before every match AND that every team that breaks on the field has an inspector following them back to their pit to ensure the repair or replacement is reinspected immediately (often because the inspector is helping the team do the repair or figure out what to do!). If we have to keep track of paperwork for all of these reinspections at a regional... yikes! I certainly hope that FIRST can come up with a wireless, computerized solution for us (something like the NI Parkway app so inspectors can document reinspections quickly right from their smartphone or tablet!).