[FRC Blog] Veteran Team Drive Base Option and Registration Progress

[Bkeeneykid]

Posted on the FRC Blog, 9/27/16: http://www.firstinspires.org/robotic...ation-progress

Veteran Team Drive Base Option and Registration Progress
Written by FIRST Staff


Registration Progress

Written by Frank Merrick.

We continue to work towards resolution of our event registration issue. We have brought in an expert on the MySQL database management system who has identified some behavioral anomalies that were occurring prior to the crash. Whether or not analyzing these anomalies will lead to our being able to identify the ‘smoking gun’ is not yet clear. However, we continue to work very hard in identifying the root cause while simultaneously creating a back-up plan.

Our goal is still to be able to announce details on the whens and hows of registration by the evening of this Friday, September 30th. As we noted before, registration will likely be the week of October 3rd, and most likely the latter part of the week, so October 5th, 6th, or 7th, or in that range.

I apologize again for this situation. Getting this fixed is a top priority within FIRST at this time and we are engaging all resources necessary.



Kit of Parts -- 2017 Drive Base Kit Option

Written by the Kit of Parts team.

Your 2017 Kickoff Kit will again include a drive base kit! Maybe; it’s up to you.

Veteran teams are invited to choose a $450 Voucher from AndyMark (available 12/7) instead of receiving a drive base kit with their Kickoff Kit (all other teams will automatically receive the drive base kit). If you prefer to receive the drive base kit, you don’t have to do a thing (except make sure your registration fee is paid by the payment deadline in November).

To accommodate drive base kit production lead times, this option is only available until noon (Eastern) on Thursday, 10/6.

We’ll be collecting teams’ decisions differently this year. Instead of making the selection in the team registration system,* we’ll be using a webform. We will only accept selections made using this form.

Steps are as follows:

1. Click this webform link.
2. Fill in the form.
   The Team ID can be found after at the end of the url that a “Lead Coach/Mentor 1” or “Lead Coach/Mentor 2” sees after clicking on a dashboard button, like “Manage Team Contact,” when logged in the team’s registration account. In the example below, the Team ID is 614361.
   
   2017 FIRST Robotics Competition Team Registration System How To Find Your Unique Team ID
3. Click Submit.
4. Do a happy dance.

If, after you fill out the form (but before the deadline), your team changes their mind about their selection, you can repeat steps 2 through 4. We’ll disregard any of your team’s previously submitted forms. For this reason, we recommend you delegate this job to one person so there aren’t multiple selections assigned to your team.

If a team does nothing by the deadline, they will be assigned the ‘default’ option of receiving the drive base kit as part of their Kickoff Kit.

We acknowledge that this system does not have all of the features we’d like.

• Can anyone fill out a form with nonsense data? Yup.
• Can rookie team fill out the form? Yup.
• Are we doing the authentication on the back end? Yup.
• Can a user lie about their name and address? Yup.

We know this is not ideal, and we beg that anyone tempted to troll this tool have mercy and not.

To help you make your decision, we can give you some general information about the 2017 drive base kit.

- It’s similar to the AM14U3 from 2016, but will not include the bumper mounting kit.

- Features are such that they enable a team to execute basic elements of game play.

- Design is such that the drive base can be assembled and driving by a small team with limited resource within two days.

We recognize that we are asking you to make a decision about a partially defined product, which can lead to frustration. Our goal is to give you as much information as possible without revealing details about the game. For example, a drive base with significant ground clearance may imply some type of obstacle on the field that robots would likely have to traverse. If we revealed details such as ground clearance, we would be giving away too much of the game.

*If you’re wondering if this change is related to The Great Registration System Crash of 2016, it is. Once the system failed, we didn’t want the testing/tweaking of this feature to distract from our IT team’s efforts to bring the system back on line and retest.

[Harrison.Smith]

"It’s similar to the AM14U3 from 2016, but will not include the bumper mounting kit."

I sure hope this doesn't mean that bumpers may be optional next year.

[Thad House]

Anyone heard from Hallry recently?

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by Thad House

Anyone heard from Hallry recently?

I heard that he's gone into hiding after missing too many FRC Blogs...

[bobbysq]

- Features are such that they enable a team to execute basic elements of game play.

This is really interesting. Does this mean it'll have some form of manipulator/launcher attached already?

Edit: Just admitting I'm wrong so this thread doesn't get flooded with people telling me that I'm wrong and a mod has to split this into "People telling bobbysq he's wrong"

[marshall]

Hey Frank, the form should be updated to specify that you are looking for the TeamID and not the UID option in the URL (it kinda says it but it should be more explicit)... I would suggest having the user just copy/paste the complete URL and then run some regex to clean it up manually after the fact since you're likely going to need to clean the dataset anyway. Just my .009 cents.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by bobbysq

This is really interesting. Does this mean it'll have some form of manipulator/launcher attached already?

Wouldn't read that much into it yet. A drivebase with no manipulator could accomplish elements of gameplay in 2016 (crossing some defenses).

[Cothron Theiss]

Originally Posted by Harrison.Smith

"It’s similar to the AM14U3 from 2016, but will not include the bumper mounting kit."

I sure hope this doesn't mean that bumpers may be optional next year.

Good guy Frank already confirmed we would have bumpers for 2017. Probably just a change in the COTS mounting kit. Hopefully FIRST changes how the bumper rules are explained as well.

Originally Posted by bobbysq

This is really interesting. Does this mean it'll have some form of manipulator/launcher attached already?

Highly doubt it. Most games have many objectives that could be completed with just a chassis. Stronghold was a perfect example of that.

[RoboChair]

Originally Posted by bobbysq

This is really interesting. Does this mean it'll have some form of manipulator/launcher attached already?

Driving around the field is a basic element of play, except for some teams in 2015. An amazing manipulator system is worthless without being able to drive reliably.

[Cothron Theiss]

Just out of curiosity, are there any teams that intend to make a custom drivetrain for the 2017 season but will NOT opt out of the KOP drivetrain? The $450 voucher is nice, but is having a KOP chassis on hand for prototyping or if something goes wrong on your intended drivetrain useful enough that you get the KOP chassis with no intention of using it in competition?

[ctt956]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Wouldn't read that much into it yet. A drivebase with no manipulator could accomplish elements of gameplay in 2016 (crossing some defenses).

True. It could also challenge and maybe score low goals(difficult, but possible) in addition to playing defense. It is often possible to score by just pushing game pieces around the field, or at least helping your alliance score by pushing game pieces.

Originally Posted by Cothron Theiss

Good guy Frank already confirmed we would have bumpers for 2017. Probably just a change in the COTS mounting kit. Hopefully FIRST changes how the bumper rules are explained as well.

Your link seems broken...

[Bkeeneykid]

Originally Posted by Cothron Theiss

Just out of curiosity, are there any teams that intend to make a custom drivetrain for the 2017 season but will NOT opt out of the KOP drivetrain? The $450 voucher is nice, but is having a KOP chassis on hand for prototyping or if something goes wrong on your intended drivetrain useful enough that you get the KOP chassis with no intention of using it in competition?

We did this in 2015, but only after realizing it would be a massive pain to attach Mechanum wheels onto the AM14U2. We kept it around and came in very useful for 2016.

[Bkeeneykid]

Originally Posted by ctt956

True. It could also challenge and maybe score low goals(difficult, but possible) in addition to playing defense. It is often possible to score by just pushing game pieces around the field, or at least helping your alliance score by pushing game pieces.



Your link seems broken...

Fixed link: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/s...ht=Blog+bumper

[nerdrock101]

Originally Posted by bobbysq

This is really interesting. Does this mean it'll have some form of manipulator/launcher attached already?

I didn't think of a manipulator, but maybe a more passive object. Like a hitch for a scoring bucket, perhaps?

I miss Lunacy.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Cothron Theiss

Just out of curiosity, are there any teams that intend to make a custom drivetrain for the 2017 season but will NOT opt out of the KOP drivetrain? The $450 voucher is nice, but is having a KOP chassis on hand for prototyping or if something goes wrong on your intended drivetrain useful enough that you get the KOP chassis with no intention of using it in competition?

We did the first year they switched to the new AndyMark AM14U systems. We wanted to make sure we could help rookie and young teams build it properly. So we got the one in the kit and had a portion of our team build it and see if they had any issues and we learned from it. Then when we had other teams come to our shop to build their drive trains, we could help them.