Lesson Learned 2016 - The Positive

[Nuttyman54]

There's a lot of positives from this season, but the biggest one for me was by far the game. While it had some issues, especially with some of the fouls and the propensity for red cards, overall I think this will go down as one of the better FRC games. It was exciting, the relatively open robot rules combined with incredible strategic depth lead to the largest variety of robot designs I've seen in my 12 years of FRC. The game was very hard to play at the highest levels, but still had enough simple tasks that lower resource teams with a good grasp of strategy and their capabilities could still be competitive. I really enjoyed seeing the different approaches that various teams took for everything from the drivetrain to the scaling mechanisms.

Most importantly, the game was very balanced. No one strategic component or game phase was utterly dominant, and the ranking points were well balanced (no overpowered extra RP like in 2012. If you wanted to get +2 RP you had to WORK for it). Major kudos to the GDC for identifying in the rules the best way to adjust game difficulty for Championships without grossly shifting the game balance between alternate strategic choices. I feel like FIRST incorporated most of the major lessons learned from previous seasons and successfully implemented them in a new game. While there are minor things to gripe about, overall I think this was an incredibly successful game.

I also think the theme, while in many regards unnecessary, wasn't so overdone that it generally detracted from the rest. I still prefer my games without themes, but this one was at least well done.

The Championship was significantly more organized than last year for 600 teams and 8 subdivisions. Registration was much smoother and faster (no 4 hour lines!) and the movement of pits out to the field on Saturday was not as bad of a traffic jam.

The COTS parts world of FRC continues to mature. While there wasn't the same massive product release like last year, VexPro, AndyMark, Rev and WestCoast Products pout out some great new products. Stealth Wheels, the plastic 2x1 VersaFrame, WCP Spartan Board, 0.030 Smoked Polycarbonate and of course the 775Pro all were major factors on our robot. Many teams also made use of the Rhino Tracks and 6" Pneumatic wheels with live axles hubs, Spark speed controller, Analog pressure sensor and more.

The average quality of A/V production this season all the way through Championships was the best I've seen. Kudos to The Solomon Group for providing a great layout at Champs for both in-venue and at-home viewing and high quality video feeds throughout the event. I heard the #FIRSTChampLIVE stream was good too, I didn't get to watch any of it on air since I was competing, but all the feedback was good. I hope we can continue to expand the reach of FIRST through modern media broadcasting and support from the frontrunners like Twitch.tv and YouTube. I also really enjoyed the throwback videos between Einstein matches, although they felt a little thrown together and didn't have much explanation with them, those kinds of pre-produced filler content is a step in the right direction.

One last thing: While it was confusing at first, the new Cost Accounting Worksheet that replaced the BOM was a HUGE improvement. It was much easier to fill out and maintain than the BOM, and COTS price cutoff increase to $5 was also a big help.