Ah yes finally a team update of no significance
idk man, PNW DCMP got 8 more teams added to it, big significance there (ignoring the touching cargo still counts for climbs thing)
I can’t wait to walk around the pits for 10 minutes each day without safety glasses!
Want to make sure people are aware of that joystick bug. It can completely ruin a match if you experience it, please update.
This was kind of implicit before, wasn’t it? I can’t remember having any trouble coming into the pit with no safety glasses in order to get to my safety glasses, but it has been over two years since I’ve been to a competition.
Time to figure out a way to climb on top of cargo to help me get that traversal rung
Depends really. Sometimes whoever is guarding the pit (I forget what that position is called lol, I got stuck doing it one year) will let you in as long as you promise you’ll go get safety glasses, sometimes they’ll tell you to come back with some from the stands.
Oh just wait - as the numbers get higher the updates get “cray cray”, as the youths are saying today.
Seems really weird (and, from a policy perspective, a potential landmine) to put this in the manual. Like, what if another team nearby is started working? I can understand having a less-than-written policy of not being super aggressive on the enforcement if they’re clearly not needed, but can’t imagine why you’d need to codify a 10 minute exception??
Highly dependent on if the safety glasses attendant was a 12 year old kid or a retired mechanical engineer of 45 years.
the mechanical engineer would let me do whatever I wanted, but that 12 year old kid ran a tight ship!
People, please stop encouraging Connor. It’s getting to his head.
You can’t stop me. Only the game manual + the team updates can.
I remember finding a team member from another team (138) who was in the lobby of an event. He was on the phone with a parent, asking them to drive his safety glasses to him at the event. I assured him that I would go to his team’s pit, get a pair of safety glasses and bring them to him.
Sometimes the safety glass attendants can be pretty strict about getting into the pits. 
Literally any event in Ontario ever. No entering the pits without safety glasses, period. Both teams in recent years I’ve worked with would have “runners” (walking!!!) to get safety glasses in the pits out to members coming in without them.
…yeah this is what’s weird to me. The explicit 10 minutes seems so arbitrary imo, and while some safety attendants will let you duck into the pit to grab safety glasses, it seems so atypical of FIRST to give the okay for something like this.
I definitely suggest that all teams implement a “no power tools rule” for the first 10 or 15 minutes the pits are open. Don’t want to put someone’s eye out, even someone on another team! During load-in, assigning one of the five as a safety watch just became even more important for the same reason.
No bones about it, I do not like this change unless accompanied by rules that limit what teams can do in the first few minutes the pits are open. The longer I live and the more I see, the more important safety rules without exceptions become. I’m turning 60 this year, and apart from presbyopia, my vision and hearing are probably still about average for the FRC students, even though I spent a fair part of my career tossing explosives into the water just so we could listen to them go bang. (I’m an acoustician for the US Navy.) And oh yes, I’ve had an astigmatism from forever.
On my glasses: I know exactly who to thank, and have for several decades, well before I needed glasses in my late 40’s. Benjamin Franklin (US founding father, freethinker, diplomat, and inventor; basically the Tony Stark of the American revolution) invented bifocal glasses. George Airy (UK royal astronomer) invented astigmatic correction lenses. I knew from family history I’d need both eventually, and it turned out that the needs came at the same time.
I’ve definitely had volunteers give us trouble about not having safety glasses as we walked to our pit first thing in the morning. While hopefully it’s not an issue for us this year (we’ve assigned each student their own individual pair of safety glasses due to COVID), if at some future point we go back to a communal safety glasses pool, this change is welcome.
I too am a bit curious about the rule. I read it and thought that it made sense until I realized a few things.
- Day 1 most teams show up at diffetent times
- Days 2 and 3 tend to take more than 10 minutes to get everyone in and to their pits
On each of these days, some who are in want to get worling right away.
I’m not a fan of this rule also. My reason is preparedness. As pit crew, we need to be prepared. As pit mentor, I make sure all of my pit crew have their safety glasses before we leave the hotel. As a team, we buy each student on the team a pair of safety glasses and they are responsible for them the entire season. It comes out of their fees. It’s one less thing for us to pack and worry about. If a pit crew arrives at the event without their safety glasses, then they’ll just have to sign out a pair at the pit entrance and send someone in to fetch the rest of the team’s safety glasses. It may be heavy handed but it doesn’t pass their negligence on to the rest of the people in the pit area.
Signed,
Someone who’s had a sliver of ferrous metal removed from his eyeball.