Quote:
Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz
FRC chose the wording "one battery" as a engineering challenge. I started in FRC when we were still using battery powered drills for drive and each drill used it's own battery. When FRC moved to the current battery (which BTW has a very good energy density) laptops were prohibitively expensive items to put on robots as well as video cameras. As the cost of these items fell, FRC changed rules to allow these devices with integral batteries to be used if the battery was not also connected to robot systems like drive or control. They still needed to be included in robot weight as they are now.
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The problem is that the wording is so ambiguous right now that no one knows what it means and now the Q&A people have provided the "your LRI will know it when they see it" (Just like pornography!) answer so I expect this to get worse. They were asked to clarify the intent of the rule, which as you say above, seems to be that there is but one source of power for the robot's drive and control systems.
But hey instead of clarifying the ambiguous wording, they've said that if the COTS computing device is designed to use a battery then it's fair game so we'll see about that
And I agree about super capacitors. They aren't any different than regular capacitors really. Our robot was described as a literal "bomb" last year because of our temporary use of them but I don't think it posed any more of a threat than anything else I've seen on robots.
I have hopes that FIRST will see the light and clarify the ruling next year or sometime soon but until then we'll keep trying new stuff. They fixed the scanning LIDAR stuff after a couple years:
http://www.firstinspires.org/sites/d...0_09_24_41.pdf
Q71 was asked by Team 900 that year. As usual, we were told to scram. They are now legal though... speaking of... have an announcement to make later.