We are looking to purchase new carpet for our practice field.
Upon looking at past threads and trying to recall what I read about a year ago, I cant find any info on the type (model) used currently at FRC competitions.
Please share if you have more info/insight.
We havent paid attention much since we had carpets from previous Hawaii regionals, but havent replaced our current practice field in years. Our current one is trashed after this past season.
Mahalo 
thank you. I tried past CD threads and didnt think to look at the manual.
No word yet on the 2025…playing surface. I wonder if they got another year out of the manufacturer or they are going in a different direction.
They have confirmed the same carpet from 2024 will be used for 2025
For 2025, the same carpet will be used from 2024. This has seen an increase in damage as robots continue to choose swerve drives and high grip wheel solutions. Gaffers tape is typically used to repair damage and holes in the carpet so teams should expect wear as the event progresses. We continue to evaluate the future of carpet used at events, with the goal to find a robust commercially available product that can also be purchased by teams.
I recommend testing gaff tape on the carpet before purchasing. Earlier this year, we bought the carpet listed in the manual and gaff tape simply would not stick to it. As gaff tape is part of the field configuration, we wound up getting less expensive carpet from a local home improvement store (after testing gaff tape on a sample) and had to find a different use for the other carpet which is thicker and nice but has the tape-not-sticking problem. Don’t want anyone else to go through what we did without knowing about this problem… big letdown to spend the money and have it not work as planned.
It’s a bit obscure if you didn’t know you were looking for it, but that problem is called out in the blog post the manual links to. Arguably FIRST should make that fact more obvious as long as it’s the recommended alternative to the official field carpet.
We’ve experienced this on the event side up in PNW, and found a couple different “solutions”
I’m not going to say they’re great solutions from a practicality standpoint, but it allowed us to run events. And the tape is still removable (albeit with more work) afterwards, at least on the timescale of a weekend.
For events, sure? What about teams at their build space after several years of reusing the carpet, is there now a wild scattering of paint lines? Can they be washed out?
what kind of paint is that? like, krylon?
Uh I didn’t really think about teams needing Carpet. Although maybe theres a brand of spray paint out there that can be washed out
It would require the field setup to be in the same exact spot on the carpet each time. Making it much more likely that some line(s) would be off the proper location.
I’m curious to learn more about this method, what it looked like and how well it stood up. If an iron is all it takes to make the tape stick and last a bit, we might consider buying the new replacement.
Depending on the event carpets may or may not be given time to relax and flatten out and/or be stretched by shuffling from end to end which could stretch the field by enough to through off the dimensions.
@brsmith121 suggested using hook velcro for marking the field in this thread: Experiences with Profusion 20 Plethora carpet - #11 by brsmith121 We haven’t tried it for real yet (just got the carpet yesterday) but I did try attaching a bit to a small part of the carpet and it looked like it would work great. We’ll try it for real next week
As a Field Supervisor, I would love for this to work. Taping is tedious, precision work done at the end of the long day of field build. Then there’s maintenance during the event.
But…
The carpet moves.
I’ve cut carpet sections off the ends, the middle, the sides, you name it.
Fixed lines aren’t realistic with the current system.
As an aside, my team hosts a community AM field. The school laid down carpet tile and it’s holding up great. Painted tape lines could work. I’m not sure that’s an option for a temporary event field though.
Yes, a bit obscure but at least the breadcrumb trail is there; the link appeared soon after our experience which prompted me to email HQ - so I do appreciate that they heard this message from me and whoever else may have sent similar feedback and connected the dots a bit better.
Lots of good alternatives & thoughts in this thread as well - grateful for all of the ideas; we may try the velcro idea ourselves.
From what I observed (as 99% of the my field taping was taken care of by my field supervisors and their crew), all taping became an N+1 person operation (where N is the normal amount of people you’d use normally). The extra person has a standard clothing iron without water, and follows along with tape operations. As the tape is placed down onto the carpet (and when it would normally just adhere), the person with the iron goes over the freshly-placed tape to heat the adhesive on the back up, and that allows the tape to actually stick like it’s supposed to.
Anecdotally it felt like tape that was applied in this manner was also more “permanent” than a normal tape line would have been, not needing to be patched or repaired as often as you would otherwise expect. Which is good, because applying tape is a multi-person ordeal that requires you to pull out the iron and extension cord for it. But the installation wasn’t so permanent that it couldn’t be pulled up at the end of the event. PNW uses carpet for two district events and the iron-on tape didn’t force a change there.
Somewhere out there there’s a photo of @juchong calibrating the irons to the proper temperature so it wasn’t too hot but I don’t have details on what temperature/settings were being targeted there.
That warming the tape is probably why there was an iron kept near the field and warm at Hueneme last season. I just focused on not hitting it with my foot.
Interesting.
