Batteries Carried Into Competitions

[GUI]

What they have ruled is reasonably logical given that the Q&A is solely for clarification of rules, and as the rules stand a battery with cables attached is a modified COTS item. There is nothing to say that there won't be a team update excluding batteries from the withholding weight. If the GDC doesn't limit itself to only interpreting rules in the Q&A, and leaving changes for team updates then the whole system breaks down. The various channels have their purposes, and the Q&A's is to clarify existing rules.

[jamie_1930]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

I believe you have accurately summarized the GDC's current position on fabricated battery assemblies. I myself don't think it's "right", but it's in the rules.

Thanks I just wanted to be 100% sure it sounds wierd but battery connectons dont take too long so I guess we can deal with it. Also from looking at the other replies this appears to have become quite an issue so for those of you who are contacting FIRST please just keep us updated on your discussions.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by GUI

What they have ruled is reasonably logical given that the Q&A is solely for clarification of rules, and as the rules stand a battery with cables attached is a modified COTS item. There is nothing to say that there won't be a team update excluding batteries from the withholding weight. If the GDC doesn't limit itself to only interpretting rules in the Q&A, and leaving changes for team updates then the whole system breaks down. The various channels have their purposes, and the Q&A's is to clarify esisting rules.

I would tend to disagree.

I don't believe this is reasonably logical. It flies in the face of years and years of competitions and what has been legal in the past. This is rules lawyering at it's worst - literal interpretation of the rules without regard to intent.

I also disagree with your statement of "the whole system breaks down". This is FIRST's, and by extension the GDC's, game and rules. They have the ability to do ANYTHING they want to do. If they make a ruling in the Q&A, then pass it on in the Team Updates, then that's just fine. It would certainly save the chaos and confusion that this is creating.

Now, very hopefully, the GDC clarifies this in an update today. If not, I'm certainly going to regard their decision making process in a whole new light.

[Zflash]

FRC has decided to make parts of the New Control System reusable. That's right. If all goes well, teams will be able to reuse the cRIO, the modules, the bumpers, the digital side car, the power distribution board, the drivers station and a number of other items. We hope to keep costs down and reduce the impact manufacturing, shipping and scrapping these items has on our environment. With more than 1700 teams expected to participate this year, we can make a big difference with this small change in policy.

Above is a post from Bill's blog. Our team is attending 3 events if we have to cut the ring connectors off of the battery cables everytime we enter a new event we are being very wasteful. If we take 6 batteries to competition we will have used 12 before regional 1, 12 at regional 1, 12 at regional 2 and 12 more at regional 3 as well as 12 more when we get home for a total of 60 ring connectors. Hopefully the GDC will make an exception for batteries or hopefully I am misunderstanding the problem.

p.s. I may be purchasing ring connector stock anyone know any good suppliers.

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by kborer22

For teams like us (and im sure there are many out there) who will be attending our first regional literally 1.5 miles from home (boston) this is a huge pain. Were certainly not going to ship out batteries a mile and half when we could just drive them over. Not to mention we have already cut our terminals to length and heat shrunk them. Why should we have to buy more terminals from andymark? Also you want to minimize the 6 AWG wire on your robot so if were were to connect a full length terminal we would be really stressing the wire and connections on the battery and at the connector end.

And the moral of the story is don't make assumptions. You made an assumption now you have to pay for it. Consider this a life lesson.

I don't believe this is reasonably logical. It flies in the face of years and years of competitions and what has been legal in the past. This is rules lawyering at it's worst - literal interpretation of the rules without regard to intent.

And yet the competition changes so what made you think that what has been legal for years and years is legal this year.

[Bharat Nain]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

I would tend to disagree.

I don't believe this is reasonably logical. It flies in the face of years and years of competitions and what has been legal in the past. This is rules lawyering at it's worst - literal interpretation of the rules without regard to intent.

I also disagree with your statement of "the whole system breaks down". This is FIRST's, and by extension the GDC's, game and rules. They have the ability to do ANYTHING they want to do. If they make a ruling in the Q&A, then pass it on in the Team Updates, then that's just fine. It would certainly save the chaos and confusion that this is creating.

Now, very hopefully, the GDC clarifies this in an update today. If not, I'm certainly going to regard their decision making process in a whole new light.

FIRST and GDC can only make rulings if teams exist to be ruled upon. I am with you on waiting it out for today. If this decision making process continues, then I am not sure if it is even worth competing since all of us are going to be busy attempting to comply with ridiculous rules anyway. On another note - Shipping lots of batteries in the crate can be EXPENSIVE and break the budget. Isn't there any regard for that?

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Zflash

Our team is attending 3 events if we have to cut the ring connectors off of the battery cables everytime we enter a new event we are being very wasteful. If we take 6 batteries to competition we will have used 12 before regional 1, 12 at regional 1, 12 at regional 2 and 12 more at regional 3 as well as 12 more when we get home for a total of 60 ring connectors. Hopefully the GDC will make an exception for batteries or hopefully I am misunderstanding the problem.

p.s. I may be purchasing ring connector stock anyone know any good suppliers.

I think you misunderstand the problem....as long as you have enough weight allowance to bring your terminated battery cable assemblies in, separate from your batteries, you should not need to do any of that.

[Rich Kressly]

No "system" is going to be broken one way or the other here. However, last week I had two students spend 3 hours getting all of our battery cables to the right length and bolted properly and securely in the correct orientation, then insulated appropriately. I'm really not "feeling the vibe" for having to take them apart before our week one comp and putting them back together, just for the sake of walking through a door. It would indeed have been nice to know this sooner, I would have shipped all batteries with the crate and paid the overage. Wouldn't it be safer having teams show up with properly connected and insulated cables using the Andymark plastic plugs instead of having all teams needing to connect cables on batteries ... some fully charged ...in the pits???

I imagined that the 40 pound allowance might cause a few issues getting into an event and because of that we shipped the robot and controls in the crate. However, this is not something I anticipated at all. I hope there's time for folks to revisit this one.

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

And the moral of the story is don't make assumptions. You made an assumption now you have to pay for it. Consider this a life lesson.

Are you suggesting that everyone needs to have every decision they make that is not explicitly allowed by the rules approved by the GDC?

My thought process (I imagine 125 went through a similar process) for keeping our batteries in our shop was as follows:

1. We have reasons that make it beneficial to keep the batteries (testing, can be fully charged upon arrival, etc.)
2. We are within 20 min. of our regional and will easily be able to transport the batteries in minivans and/or pickup trucks that will be part of our caravan.
3. The definitions that would apply to this situation are identical to those in previous manuals.
4. In previous years batteries could be brought to competitions without counting as part of our allowance of Fabricated Parts.
5. Section 4 of the manual states that batteries do not have to be shipped with the robot and makes no mention of them being part of the Withholding Allowance.

You always have to make assumptions at some point, you will never have perfect information. The goal is to get enough information so that the assumptions have the greatest chance of being correct. If you see a major flaw in my thought process or feel that a reasonable person would review the objective statements I have made and come to the conclusion that the batteries should be shipped I would be interested to hear about it.

[Racer26]

When the rules explicitly state that the batteries DO NOT need to be shipped with the robot, it is then IMPLICIT that they are allowed to be brought in in unlimited quantities. Also, as vikesrock said, all the rules pertaining to this have NOT changed since at least 2007. If it was allowed then, even if it WAS 'against' the rules, precedent says it should be allowed now, because the rules were not modified in such a way that it was EXPLICITLY illegal.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

And the moral of the story is don't make assumptions. You made an assumption now you have to pay for it. Consider this a life lesson.

And yet the competition changes so what made you think that what has been legal for years and years is legal this year.

Adam,

I'm tired and very pissed off at the GDC right now, so excuse my bluntness when I tell you that you're being a jerk. Cut the self righteous "You assumed and made an $@#$@#$@# out of me and you" garbage.

This ruling by the GDC is completely out of left field. Nobody saw this coming, and teams cannot reasonably in good faith expect the rules to change on such a massive scale AFTER ship date. This rule is such a departure from everything FIRST has ever said and done before that it just defies logic. Furthermore it has to be THE most useless ruling in the history of FIRST. What exactly is this going to do? What is the point? Teams will waste 30 minutes reterminating batteries...there is no competitive advantage to bringing in pre-terminated batteries.

To all those saying "well teams backed the GDC into a corner", I say not so. The GDC backed themselves into the corner when they chose to introduce a manual that was woefully inadequate in how it explained major portions of the rules. When this many experienced mentors cannot even agree on what the rules actually say, something is wrong. The Q&A should have solved that. Instead it made it worse-Q&A rulings that conflict with one another and make no sense, rulings like this, etc. Each new Q&A response further muddles both the letter and intent of the rule and teams are forced to ask further questions about everything under the sun to make sure they are in compliance with the rules.

The only life lesson here that I can see is that it's better to keep quiet and not say anything and compete with potentially illegal parts than do the right thing and ask for clarification on unclear rules.

PS. 254 will have plenty of ring terminals and heat shrink in our pit at regionals... we'd be happy to help teams reterminate their batteries (assuming heatshrink and ring terminals are still COTS by then)

[Bob Steele]

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

I imagined that the 40 pound allowance might cause a few issues getting into an event and because of that we shipped the robot and controls in the crate. However, this is not something I anticipated at all. I hope there's time for folks to revisit this one.

This is an understatement and I am really glad that Oregon is not a first week regional this year. This will have to be fixed.

I also can only imagine the lines of teams trying to get in on Thursday morning while everything they bring in is checked... Imagine standing in line waiting to have your stuff weighed as it is brought in... If you are lucky you will be first in line... and have 59 other teams waiting behind you... at 1 minute per team that will take an hour... with two weigh stations it would be 30 minutes.....minimum... and that is based on 1 minute per team which will never happen.

I would hope that we are allowed to act as gracious professionals and police ourselves...

By the way, yes assumptions were made... but there have only been a few years when the batteries had to be in the crate.

The question to ask here is this:

We were encouraged to keep our control systems at home to work with them.
How were we supposed to use them without batteries?

One of the major points of the COTS and other rules from the past are to ship the whole robot... and not keep assemblies...however the rule this year didn't specify what we could keep. If the GDC had wanted ONLY the control system retained (and that was the purpose of the 40 lb rule..) because it was new... then it could have simply stated that..

Frankly i am getting pretty tired of trying to guess why a rule was instituted.
I have worked with federal regulations my whole life and intent was specified in a separate document along with the process of why the rules were made and what they were supposed to cover. If we understand the intent of a rule... we can design and specify systems to comply...

It seems that we are having to guess at the intent of rules this year.

In the past, many, many teams have been outside the allowed rules if we are now saying that the rule has always said that batteries with cables attached were not allowed to be brought in to the venue with the team.

I guess that in the end, my question to the GDC would be:

What is the purpose of making us reassemble our battery cables at an event?

Everyone has batteries... Everyone has to use them during the build season...
Why should we have to purchase more cable and connectors?

To say that you have to because its "in the rules" is a cop out..

We will see what happens tonight in the update.

[JesseK]

The only life lesson here that I can see is that it's better to keep quiet and not say anything ...

This was the only way I was able to get part of our robot painted black instead of purple . Of course, I had to cover bases and ensure that it still looked tasteful in doing so.

Grab someone wearing a purple shirt in DC if you need extra help. Our competition batteries were shipped with the crate since we have an away regional, and the only batteries we may bring in are the ones we'd use for testing in the pits anyways ... and not on the field... (charging pneumatics before matches, testing motors that may or may not be burned out, etc).

Which brings up the point that this ruling is completely unenforcable if teams begin to claim that batteries are for testing and not competition; or it steps up a notch in absurdity and contradiction if they include non-competition batteries in the withholding allowance.

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

Are you suggesting that everyone needs to have every decision they make that is not explicitly allowed by the rules approved by the GDC?

No. You made the assumption that battery + wiring harness equates to a battery.

Originally Posted by Cory

Adam,

I'm tired and very pissed off at the GDC right now, so excuse my bluntness when I tell you that you're being a jerk. Cut the self righteous "You assumed and made an $@#$@#$@# out of me and you" garbage.

The rule makes perfect sense to me. If you can't get the part in that form from a manufacturer it's not COTS. There is a difference between being a jerk and pointing out reality. Would I have done the same thing? Sure.

[Don Wright]

PS. 254 will have plenty of ring terminals and heat shrink in our pit at regionals... we'd be happy to help teams reterminate their batteries (assuming heatshrink and ring terminals are still COTS by then)

Just don't pre-cut the heat shrink to the proper length

As many have said before, this is a ridiculous ruling (even more than the no band-saws in the pits from two years ago). I expect them to back out of this one.