Hazard on Dome Floor

[TravisCarpenter]

As those of you who were often on the dome floor may have noticed, the plastic tiling creating a considerable amount of static electricity. I didnt notice it until quarterfinals started in my division. I had heard a rumor that a team had completely erased all of their programming when they touched their robot. I had my Ipaq sitting in our tool box on the dome floor and I walked over to open up the tool box. I touched a drawer, and felt some static jump between my finger and the toolbox. I opened up the drawer to check on my ipaq, and it turns out that the shock had completely wiped everything from my PDA. It was as if it had performed a hard reset on its own. I put it down, and came back about 10 minutes later. I touched the tool box and got another shock. I opened up my ipaq and once again it was going through its initial start up and configuration procedures as if I had performed a hard reset or it had just come out of the box. Did anyone else have any similar problems. If there were enough accidents, I think that this is an issue that should be presented to FIRST so that they can try and make sure that next year a different type of floor can be used in order to prevent some of the high priced electronics that are included on the robots.