**FIRST EMAIL**/Robot Ship Day and Driver Station Updates

FIRST General Forum
#1

Greetings Teams:

Robot Ship Date:
After an in depth exploration of the options and careful consideration of the potential impact, the Director of FRC with the advice of the GDC decided that although Robot Ship Day must remain February 23rd this year, all FRC teams will be allowed to hold back up to 65 pounds of their robot’s weight and may continue to work on that portion of the robot up until their first event. For more details see Bill’s Blog. http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/

Driver Station and LabVIEW updates:
FRC LabVIEW Update 2.1 for 2010 http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/lang/en/id/1534 This also updates the cRIO image.

Driver Station Update 1.1 for 2010 http://joule.ni.com/nidu/cds/view/p/lang/en/id/1535 Install this update on your classmate.

Fixed and Known Issues updates here: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/487FB316344500E6862576C8004CC32D?OpenDocument

Go Teams!

#2

How many teams actually keep up to date with emails and Bill’s Blog?

#3

At the very least the main contact on each team receives the email updates. So at least one person on each team should be up to date. You can add alternate contacts (through TIMS) who will also receive the emails.

#4

Sometimes, team mentors don’t check up on that stuff. It’s easy to blow it off. My team mentor always sent it out to the team…

#5

All teams should have a mentor or responsible student monitoring all email blasts and updates.

With that said…I want to comment on the ability of teams to hold back 65 pounds of the robot to work on due to many work stoppages due to the weather.

We are going to the first week of Regionals and will have only 8 days to work, while other teams that or in weeks 5 and 6 will have many weeks to work. Fair to some not fair to others.

#6

Same answer to most things in FIRST- Life’s just not fair. Tough luck.

Disclaimer- we are a week 1 team as well.

#7

Hopefully all of us. It’s not that hard to do.

#8

I’ve seen many people mention this before, but its really hard to keep up with all the different places FIRST is now posting info… the Q&A, the Blog, the Team Updates, the Team emails… I hope especially for the Rookie’s teams sake that they start consolidating this, or at least provide a TIMS option “receive emails for all updates”. They used to email out the team updates, Im not sure why they stopped… in the days of things like RSS feeds, it seems like it would be really easy to set up. And they used to provide summaries/compilations of the Q&A for printout… a weekly version of that would be a huge help to most teams. Honestly keeping up with Chief Delphi Forums is easier than keeping up with all the FIRST updates…

#9

feed://usfirst.org/rss-blastarchive.aspx is a good start.

#10

Kim,

I agree completely. Add to this technical information sources such as the WPI Think Tank and the NI FIRST Community and it is totally overwhelming.

Mike

#11

Does this mean that if a team has a robot that only weights 65 pounds, they could keep the whole thing? Bills blog is fun to follow. For those that don’t use them, set up an RSS feed in Internet Explorer or the browser of your choice. And while, your at it, set up one on Chief Delphi too.
Brian

#12