We know many teams are recruiting and training new students this time of year. With that in mind, we wanted to share some new resources that have been created as well as remind everyone of some existing resources we have available.
Let’s start with some of the fun new resources that we have available for teams this season:
Updated Mentor Guide - We have updated and rebranded our “Guide to Running a FIRST® Robotics Competition Team” to the FIRST Robotics Competition Mentor Guide. This guide is intended to help teams with best practices for running their FIRST Robotics Competition team and is a great resource for both rookie and veteran teams. We highly recommend this resource for all mentors!
Build Season Timeline: We took the high-level Build Season Timeline from the Mentor Guide and created PDF files to allow teams to take the timeline, print it, and post in their shop. The Build Season Timelines can be found under Team Organization on the Team Management webpage. If the original timeline we created is not quite how your team is organized, no worries, we also added the Excel template to allow teams to customize before printing for their shop.
Mental Health Resources – This document covers some tips to help ensure your FIRST Robotics Competition team has a healthy and supportive environment for teens and mentors during the build and competition season.
Scouting resources – We worked with FIRST Robotics Competition Team, 1678 – Citrus Circuits, to create two scouting resources:
Introduction to Scouting - This guide is intended to be an introduction to scouting and cover scouting basics.
Intermediate Scouting - This guide is intended to be an intermediate overview of scouting. This guide covers how to visualize data (spreadsheets and Tableau), Computed fields, Subjective Scouting, initial statistics of scouting, and scouting for match strategy.
Kickoff Worksheet – This Kickoff Worksheet helps teams identify important rules and strategies for each season’s game. A huge shoutout to FIRST Robotics Competition Team, 2791 – Shaker Robotics, for putting this worksheet together and for allowing FIRST® to edit and update the guide.
Computer Requirements: This Computer Requirements Document serves as a recommendation for the hardware and operating system requirements for the computer system needed for each FIRST program.
The Compass Alliance (TCA) Worksheets – The Compass Alliance is made up of a group of teams from around the world. Their goal is to help support teams with resources produced by the veteran teams. A few years ago, they reached out to FIRST with an idea to create a series of worksheets. These worksheets are intended to help teams with various aspects of FIRST. They do not tell teams exactly how to do things but instead have questions and resources to help guide teams to learn and make decisions for themselves on how to do everything. The first batch has been released on both the Technical Resources and Team Management webpages. They have worksheets on everything from the Dean’s List Award, to how to set up the Pit, to Prototyping and everything in between!
There are many more resources available on both the Technical Resources and Team Management webpages. We have previously blogged about some of these, but I want to call out that we have resources on everything from recruitment to fundraising to bumper construction to electrical to CAD, and more!
We know that these resources are just a start to what teams are looking for. If you know of additional resources that exist or have ideas on resources that you think would help teams, please reach out to [email protected]. Additionally, if you are interested in helping us to produce additional resources, please reach out. We know our community is full of amazingly talented people and we would love the help of our community to make FIRST Robotics Competition more accessible to all teams.
KitBot
While we’re not ready to share any of the new KitBot resources quite yet, we did want to call out that we have created a new webpage to host the KitBot Resources all in one place. Closer to Kickoff, we’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor release the shopping list and on Kickoff, and this webpage will be updated with all of the resources we previously mentioned!
Volunteer Registration
Finally, I amAndyMark happy to share that Volunteer Registration is now open for all FIRST Robotics Competition Events, including FIRST Championship! We’d love your help! Want to know how to register as a volunteer? Take a look at this Volunteer Registration System Instructions.
these are very bad recommendations, gaming laptops are extremely bad for FRCFIRST Robotics Competition purposes (from personal experience and others in the community have said)
I advise teams to go with a business grade laptop, do not get a cheap gaming laptop, you will have issues like:
bad battery life
very poor durability
overheating
overpriced
bloatware
you dont need that much power in 99% of FRCFIRST Robotics Competition applications
and chromebooks are not good either, nor are macbooks
I agree, this could lead a lot of teams down the wrong path. Especially those with members who have a cult like obsession with anything Apple to buy a Mac which is not suited to FRC well at all. (Can you tell I am not a fan of apple XD)
Where in the recommendations did you see them recommend a “cheap gaming laptop”? The performance laptops they listed are $1.3k and $1.6k each and the recommend a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050+ and an i7+ (overkill imo for most CAD software but still) neither of which would be found on a cheap laptop.
As for your issues listed, it really depends what vendor and laptop you buy. Weird to generalize that, as my personal cyberpower gaming laptop is far better at all of those points than my work business grade dell laptop.
They also very clearly marked how Macs and Chromebooks (which many students already have) can be used and what limitations they will have.
Overall this document is well thought out and well laid out compared to have all of this information in many different places,as it was before.
A teacher going to walmart with those spec recommendations is going to buy a very… “nice” laptop.
Remember, it’s likely a teacher, and maybe not a tech-savvy one looking at this. They aren’t going to bargain hunt or have the innate “buyers knowledge” that we all have.
A non tech-savvy teacher that uses this guide will likely buy the Dell or HP laptops listed in the guide. If they were to go to walmart’s website and buy a CAD laptop with the performance specs listed they would end up MSI Sword, HP Gaming Laptop or Lenovo LOQ for about $1k. Unless I am missing something on walmart’s website.
Exactly! The problems many people have listed here are common to cheap laptops in general. Not gaming laptops. Our school provided Dell latitudes (i7s so not bottom of the barrel) broke in under two years. Effectively becoming unusably unstable by the second. Meanwhile my personal Asus Zeypherus has crashed a grand total of twice in the nearly three years ive had it, even while being subjected to frc or my personal abuse. Machine quality matters a whole lot more than the marketing buzzwords an OEMs B2B division decided to add to their laptops. That said, high end business laptops, in the 2.5k+ range that have actual verified hardware (like a thinkpad T or X series) are definitely a teams best bet reliability wise out-of-the-box.
I think a couple folks are missing the forest for the bumper wood. Having worked on more than a few docs like this - when you have as diverse an audience as we do and the scope of the program is as broad as the Mississippi, this doc is a huge step up for getting more folks informed about basic expectations.
I’ve been waiting for volunteer registration to open up. I retired from the X-Cats so I can expand my volunteering and try out FLL and FTC. I have applied at thirteen events so far. I’ve been assigned at an FLL event already.
It’s very cool to see HQ take a more proactive stance on making sure teams are aware of the importance of scouting and have access to relevant resources. HQ has been cranking out some great ideas for improving the FRC experience across the board.
