Need for Inspections Rules Changes

[Mark McLeod]

A big problem last season was verifying multiple software versions and proper setups. We ran a full software inspection on Thursday to alleviate later issues on the field that would be much harder to troubleshoot.
It worked great for avoiding field problems, but backed up the inspection process.

Some things, such as the Driver Station version could be told at a glance, and by Championship the WPA settings were much more timely, however, it was not terribly easy to check the cRIO, LabVIEW, WindRiver versions that could cause hard to diagnose issues later on. I'd like to see at least the cRIO version displayed on the Driver Station along with the DS version, so we can tell at a glance, instead of requiring setting up a special laptop connection. It'd be nice too, to embed an easily accessable development environment version ID in code downloaded to the cRIO that can be automatically displayed on the Driver Station as well.

Your suggestion of a mini vs full inspection worked pretty well last season to get teams onto the playing field on Thursday. I like the idea of validating a robot for multiple Regionals, with the caveat that I did see many questionable passes I would attribute to inspectors just getting their feet wet on Thursday morning. The mini-inspection should also spot the need for re-doing full-inspections.