What Have Been The Gains Over The Past 20 Years In FRC?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by rsisk

Interesting, I wonder what stimulated this change...

In a happy coincidence, I just happened to run across this excerpt from a Woodie Flowers Award submission an hour ago:

In 2000, the Technokats robot, “TechnoBeast,” consisted of a transmission that shifted from high to low gears using a servo. This design was possible because of a major contribution by Andy and was very successful. To top it all off, in the summer of 2000, Andy made a decision to upload the design featuring explanations and draft prints to the Chief Delphi website for other teams to download. Since it was uploaded, 149,636 people have downloaded the prints, and many teams have actually used that design to this day. Elgin Clock of Team 237 from Watertown, Connecticut said, “(A) big hearty thank you goes out to the TechnoKats for their gracious professionalism in sharing this idea! We modified it quite a bit to accept a pneumatic mechanism, but it's still the same concept." Andy believes that if another team can take a design that the Technokats have come up with, and modify it to work for themselves, it raises the level of competition in FIRST. Because of the overwhelming positive response, the TechnoKats drive designs from that present season are released for the general public.

Andy Baker and Team 45 won't take all the credit, but we TechnoKats consider ourselves proud to be among the first in FRC to be so open about our designs.