Our team was given a technical foul for touching the driver controls before the “ding” but after autonomous was disabled and the “buzzer” sounded. The judge said that it violated G16. We looked at G16 and nothing in G16 talks about the buzzer or ding. We learned that the rule only applied during autonomous and not after it was disabled, meaning that the technical should not have been called on us. We talked to the judges about it and they would not take away the foul. This is just a warning to other teams, do not touch the driver controls until after the ding, even though this is not in the rules, it’s still a technical.
Per Section 3.1.1 “Each Period ends when the ARENA timer displays zero (0) seconds.”.
The sounds are all unofficial and in many instances this year appear to be delayed by 1-3s or more from the actual timer.
Judges have no authority to do anything about scoring or fouls. You needed to talk to the head referee in order to find out what was really going on. Specifically, a student team member should have gone to the “question box” by the scoring table and asked why the foul was assessed, being ready to point out the actual wording of the rule if you thought the ref was applying it incorrectly.
I’m familiar with this situation and I’m pretty sure the OP meant “ref”, not “judge”. It was answered in the question box.