Cheesecake and Pasta

FIRST General Forum
#1

First, some definitions:

Cheesecake is the term that found prominence in 2015 for components and assemblies that are created by a high-performing team and installed on their previously low-performing partners at their events in the effort of raising the level of competition, creating open communications between teams, and instilling a level of competitive success. Examples include tote ramps and can grabbers in 2015.

Pasta is a silly word I made up for this thought exercise (I sincerely hope somebody comes up with a better name) - it stands Parts & Assemblies Specific To Agame. These are COTS components that appear to be designed to tackle a specific challenge in a specific game, in the effort of raising the level of competition, creating open communications between teams and suppliers, and instilling a level of competitive success. Examples include Rhino Tracks* in 2016 and Greyt Claws in 2018.

Both Cheesecake and Pasta are controversial issues, and participants can have wildly different and extreme opinions tied to each.

Here’s my question: Is there a correlation between Cheesecake opinions and Pasta opinions? Please select a poll option, and please feel free to explain any connection between your opinions (or lack thereof) in this thread.

*I understand that the designer has said on record that the Rhino Track system was created before Stronghold became known, but the perception persists.

#2

I’m solidly in the not sure bucket. Here are some hypothetical extremes I *am *sure about:

Cheesecake:
OK:
“Hey, we’re so happy to have a chance to work with you on our alliance! We really like features X Y Z on your robot and that’s why we chose you. We think our primary competition will be other alliance X. Do you agree? Ok, cool. One way they are better than us is X. Do you agree? Cool. Hey, we happen to have brought parts to be able to fabricate/attach a mechanism which might be able to boost our ability to do X. Do you think this could help the alliance? Want to put it on your robot? Can we contribute students to help too? Awesome!”

NOT OK:
“Well, we think your robot stinks, you’re only here cuz we didn’t have better options. The only way we’ll win is if you take our superior mechanism and put it on our robot. Do it, cuz we chose you.”

“Pasta”
OK:
“Hey, we’re company X and we saw the FRC game this year, so we whipped up a demo of some existing parts, and maybe a custom part or two to show how you might be able to buy stuff from us and do well in this year’s game. Here’s all the good and bad stuff we found - investigate for yourself and let us know if you want to purchase anything!”

NOT OK:
“Hey, we’re company X! Tell us what you want your robot to do, and we’ll sell you a professionally engineered complete bolt-on mechanism for exactly whatever the max price is! You don’t even need to think about design anymore! No learning required! Just let us sell you the whole thing!”

What I see as common: In both NOT OK cases - there is an active effort to take teachable and inspiration-able moments out of the picture, in the blind pursuit of perfection.

Sometimes purchased-finished is the right answer. But there must be reasons other than “that’s what we were told” or “that’s what worked last year” or “we just had money to throw at the problem”.

What it comes back to is both of these are really resources, which must be properly leveraged by mentors to Teach and Inspire their students. The exact implementation of properly will vary team-to-team, but in no case should it reinforce some of the bad decision-making lessons mentioned in the previous paragraph.

#3

Unless you’re playing at an event where the team count starts with a 2 (hiiii UNC Asheville 2016), you’ve probably got your choice of BLTs available for some cheesecaking. Find the ones you vibe with, tell 'em “We’ve got some parts that would really help our playoff strategy, would you be up for getting them integrated during the lunch break?” If they say no, you probably didn’t want to pick them anyway.

As for PASTA, if a company thinks they can make money selling a product I say go for it. They could easily post the plans already for copying (guilty), this is just the next step of finding a shop to make the parts, assuming the entrepreneurial risk, and pushing the button.

#4

Understood, I was more attempting to key-off of the “cheesecake provider force feeds cheesecake to cheesecakeee” scenario. As you indicated, if your team strongly believes in the need to cheesecake a bot (aka not really up for a design discussion), the proper method is to make sure the cheesecakeee is onboard first. Don’t let it become a point of contention. If that means doing pit scouting apriori, that’s what must be done.

#5

Your definition of pasta is making me reevaluate my position on cheesecake.

I see cheesecake as a way for team A to elevate team B only for the match they share… so it is selfish in that regard, but requires an additional level of engineering on the part of team A. So, kudos to team A.

Pasta on the other hand requires no additional engineering by either team in an alliance. Just a credit card. And I guess it makes watching matches less boring… and then the team A doesn’t need to bring as much cheesecake… and can focus on scouting?

#6

I think the real question is if students are getting inspired. Didnt people have issue with the KoP when it first came out? (looking in past threads) That also raised the floor of competition and made a whole aspect of robot building simpler, and it seems like it was a net gain from it.

#7

What interests me about what both of you said here is that you’ve brought a whole different aspect of this idea into question. The question itself seems a whole lot more political the more that you think of it. (And not in a bad way, because there is a political aspect to “Pasta” dilemma, and how we choose to think of it is mostly opinion based.) The question isn’t,“Should teams buy this?”, but is “Should suppliers sell this?” And while that question seems obvious, it provokes the though as to who determines what is an FRC legal part that can be sold?
Sure, it fits within the rules of the game, but should FIRST have regulations on how “prefabricated” parts can be? How is it different, through an ethical lens, to have a kit that you can buy for your main mechanism, than buying a drive chassis kit? Should FIRST require that FRC legal “kits” like the GreyT elevator or a chassis kit of some sort be modified by the team to an extent for legal play? These questions might not be super helpful, but these were my thoughts, and they might help provoke a deeper discussion, or different aspect thereof. I’m only a student, but questions like these really get me going, and I love this sort of discussion! :smiley:
And lastly, like I said earlier, this is more of an opinion based topic. Personally I like COTS parts, because without them, a lot of teams would struggle to get past the barriers to entry of FRC. (Which hits close to home, considering how Indiana struggles to gain teams as a district, and new teams struggle to be competitive. I’ve always seen building custom parts as a level of sophistication that the highest-tier teams can do, and using COTS parts was a way to circumvent the craziness of your early seasons by making some parts of the robot more cut-and-dry to level the playing field.) But as the original discussion has been about,“How much is too much?”

#8

Calling things “cheesecake” and “pasta” are waffling around the issue to make it seem more delectable. Pasta is just a COTS mechanism.

#9

My problem with cheesecake is that it can actively discourage teams. I’m not talking about the team that gives or gets the cheesecake… I’m talking about the team that put in an effort and didn’t get picked. An alliance captain can sit there and think “Hmm, we could pick team X, who has an OK mechanism… or we can pick team Y that is just a kitbot with nothing on it and put our own, better mechanism on them”. Team X just missed out on a chance to see their efforts move forward in the playoffs so that another team could see their efforts work on two different robots. I’ve talked with teams that have lost out to a spot in the playoffs because the alliance captain wanted to cheesecake an otherwise worse performing robot, and those teams were not inspired.

My problem with pasta is essentially the same thing. You can spend all your time and effort building something your proud of, only to lose out to a team that spends less time and effort but has a bigger bank account. Is this program about engineering or economics?

#10

As a co-founder of the Cheesecake moniker, I have to say going to an entree/appetizer terminology is just all wrong.

Clearly staying in the dessert realm is what makes the most sense.

What’s a dessert that people either love, or love to hate? Carrot Cake

Henceforth, you may refer to a configurable end-use COTS mechanism as Carrot Cake.

Please carry on with the discussion.

-Brando

#11

Fruitcake works better imo, carrot cake at least has a middle ground.

#12

I think a poll would show an overwhelming poor response to Fruitcake as a dessert.

I think a healthy amount of people fall on both sides of the Carrot Cake spectrum.

-Brando

#13

Fair point.

#14

I’d rather eat disgusting carrot cake than watch robots break down all the time.

#15

The true question that needs answered is:

Is cheesecake a cake or a pie?

#16

How about Cannoli? It’s a tasty dessert made from RiCOTSa Cheese.

Robot-wise, I’m mostly comfortable with cheesecake now, but not PASTA/Carrot Cake/Cannoli. Give me a year or two.

Dessert-wise, I definitely prefer Cannoli.

#17

Neither.

It’s nutrition* because I just ate it**.

*I didn’t say good nutrition, did I?
**I wish…

#18

Sooo, is WCP then the Spaghetti Warehouse, and AndyMark or Vex the Cheesecake Factory or am I mixing too many metaphors? Or is AndyMark the Old Spaghetti Factory? Maybe Rev is Oilive Garden?

I mean one is a cheescake place that serves pasta, and the others are pasta places that serve a lot of cheesecake.

Is pasta really that hard to make?****

As an fan of both Carrot Cake, and Fruit Cake, and possible founder of MCC concept, can MCC be Carrot Cake (as in Mmmmm Carrot Cake, and the super wiz bang that nobody wants be fruit-cake… IE, we made a robot that in concept should be awesome because we designed a subsystem to do everything. In practice… nobody likes us except the makers… *

Lava-cake is clearly a system that let’s the magic smoke out…

…did I go too far… I think I went to far… Its CD, can you ever really go too far… Oh, that’s what the red dots are for…

Guys I think you are all awesome, and really happy that vendors are making products that support FRC. Please keep up the great work, including offering products that make us have existential crisis on what it means to participate in FRC. I am sooo glad we can use more than conduit and the small parts catalog*.

Back in the day, the restrictions on material were soo tight, teams had to use the cover of the small parts catalog as shim stock because shim stock was not an allowed part. Let’s not go back to those dark ages.*

***Anyone want to do a retro Ri3D, I dare you to try to build an FRC bot in 3 days using the 1990s rules regarding material availability/usage…

****Yes, boiling water and warming sauce is easy, but have you every tried making your own noodles and sauce from scratch? Kinda reminds me of making your own transmissions…

#19

After what I witnessed in St. Louis in 2015, I cannot ever say I am for cheesecake. There is no limit to how much one could eat… or worse, be forced to eat.

#20

Of course without cheesecake we’d never have see the quad-harpoon-can-grabbing-madness that happened the same year…