FIRST Robots: Behind the Design - Lunacy

[Enigma's puzzle]

I know what you mean, i have them both and i wish they had a little more detail too, but i guess if you are the team you dont want to give away all the information on your v6, or swerve drives as the next year you will have a bunch of impostor robots.

So right now we should be looking for the overdrive book this summer.
lunacy wouldn't come out until after the next nationals. It would be difficult to make right now because the awards have not even been given out yet.

[Alex Cormier]

Why does it have to be a book. Why not make it all online?

[Phyrxes]

exactly an e-book (pdf even) would be an awesome resource.

[Joe Ross]

Here's the answer from the author: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...5&postcount=17

[Elgin Clock]

It would be nice, (& also able to be very streamlined), to just get a copy of the awards speeches that are announced before ALL these awards (whether they be technical, or even the team & individual awards such as C/A, WFFA, or EI) at competitions, & then have those write-ups released as an online e-book of them all with pictures of the robots and/or teams & individuals involved (for the WFFAs).
This would greatly improve the documentation of not only who won an award for a certain year, but also why they won it for anyone who is interested - which is exactly what the FIRST Robots: Behind The Design books did for the technical awards.

If only one day we could be that organized!

Maybe we can start one regional at a time, & then over time, collaborate between all of the regionals & the championship event for one mass publication.

Hmm... sounds like quite the ambitious project - but I think it can be accomplished with some good planning.

[Enigma's puzzle]

Maybe we can get the winning teams to write there own biographys, they could put them up as a white paper and consolidate them all.

OR like the Unsung first heros, if you believe you have something special different, etc. you can write it up, or make a presentation and it can be be put into a showcase like the Unsung FIRST Heros.

[lukevanoort]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

Why does it have to be a book. Why not make it all online?

I had a plan to do this last year. Bascially, I was writing a specialized wiki program specifically for robot articles. However, work and school got in the way of completing the project (I was essentially writing MediaWiki - not the easiest of tasks). Later, I determined that the difference between my software (DRD, as I was calling it) and MediaWiki was significantly smaller than the similarity; so, I halfway hatched a plan to just customize MediaWiki. Then, university started...

Anyway, going fully online offeres some significant advantages over a purely text-based system. Image notes (like on Flickr) come to mind for better captioning of photos. The Web also offers a better ability to link to resources and references. For example, if a team makes something using Kalman filters, they could link to a site discussing the theoretical basis for Kalman filters instead of cluttering the article with overly technical explanations. (A real world example would be team 121 linking to http://mizugaki.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/st...F/EV_Trans.pdf) Online resources also allow for video, and downloadable content (such as CAD files for a swerve module or gearbox).