Having just returned from Alamo I have a Proposition:
Next year all kit of parts will be shipped with an electronic lock sealing the KOP contents. After kickoff each team must log into the FIRST website and take a rules test for that year which focuses on the robot and the bumper rules. When they get a 100% score the website issues an electronic key, unique to each team, which will allow them to unlock thier KOP. I believe this would greatly expedite the inspection sequence and get all teams on the field quicker.
Yeah. And there was that one team that showed up at Lone Star with a 118" frame perimeter too. Man did those guys make a real rookie mistake.
Anyways, Alamo had a more difficult than usual time of getting everyone past inspection. I was bad enough that the Lone Star RD was drafted to start kicking rears and getting teams to inspection on Thursday night. I wasn’t in too many pits, but there were a large number of basic wiring errors like not powering the analog bumper or installing the jumper to measure battery voltage. Plus software updates, bumper issues, etc. Alamo is lacking a fully stocked Lone Star style spare/small parts table, so getting teams fixed takes even longer since you have to hunt around the pits to find parts and material you need to make the repairs and mods.
Well, I don’t know if this is the best way of doing it… but something really does need to be done to help teams out… perhaps they have to pass a test before having access to the online KoP orders.
Certainly rules on robot sizing need to be at the forefront of every team’s mind.
I inspected one team (bumper perimeter and weight were fine) but the “top half” of their robot exceeded the bumper perimeter, and the response was, “Oh, man… we were oversize last year, too.”
Auuuuugh!
This was not fun for me… it feels awful to tell someone that they have to slice their robot apart… they would have had so much more fun if someone had forced them to read the rules and UNDERSTAND the rules in advance.
Really the quiz could just focus on size, weight, and main power switch placement. Just about everything else can be hacked together reasonably easily.
One thing that would be extra helpful is if the GDC/HQ could release the Inspection Checklist sometime earlier than a few days before shipping. I’m thinking something like the same day the robot rules are released. We run a pair of rookie bootcamps during the season, and it’s hard to impress ALL the robot rules on rookie teams in the space of a few hours. I think thinks would be a bit smoother if we could hand them a draft version of the checklist and tell them to run their robot through it once a week. I just can’t understand why it takes them nearly 6 weeks to release the checklist when having it earlier would be so useful.
Similarly, I was talking with EricVanWyk Friday morning at Alamo, and he was proposing that the regional distribute match schedules Thursday at lunch. To light fires under teams and their potential allies when they all realize that this is real. Nothing like the prospect of Match 1 without your robot on the field to get some teams moving.
This scares me - a lot. Do teams not conduct post-season reviews, figure out what mistakes they made, what they learned, and how they can do better next year? Seems like common sense - don’t make the same mistake twice.
You think that’s bad? At Lone Star there was another team that enabled their robot without putting it on blocks and it almost ran over my drive team and head scout! Maybe we should also put programming locks on the cRIOs that check for 2x4’s under the robot before enabling off the field
Seriously, though, this year we took the Bastrop rookie team under our wing and it was a really helpful experience for both of our teams because we helped them avoid a lot of the rookie mistakes we made, and it helped us be extra mindful of various rules & also reminded us of what it feels like to approach this whole endeavor with a blank slate.
Maybe it would be a good idea for teams to just cluster together, rookie, veteran, whatever, and from time to time during the build season to do practice or mini-inspections on each other’s designs and robots. I know some teams like to keep designs to themselves, but I think it would be really helpful for all involved…just a thought.
Touche, sir. Luckily I learned my lesson and that didn’t happen again. Until we were on the practice field and the robot attacked me and the table we had the driver station on…
We have a custom operator console with pots that aren’t necessarily on center. So if the joystick order is wrong, interesting things can happen. So yeah, I think I AM going to look at putting an interlock in there to make sure teleop doesn’t start if the drive stick is wildly off-center.
