I know there will be some wear and tear on these balls but does anyone know if there’s any metric for assessing amount of damage your robot might be doing to a ball? Can you be penalized for excessive the fuzzing? Not sure that’s a word.
If you skin the ball you will be asked to fix your robot before playing another match…
Although, showing the Robot Inspectors that you’ve pulled the offending breakers so the skinning mechanism cannot operate will probably be okay, too.
This is one of those “referee judgement” things. If it looks excessive to you it’s going to look the same to the refs.
I think there is a spectrum obviously and we won’t really know until Week 0 and Week 1s give FIRST the feedback it needs.
As a rule of thumb if when working with Cargo if your intake, hopper or shooter resemble the aftermath of sheering Red/Blue sheep you probably are not going to make it through season without a talking to.
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In 2020 a lot of teams banked on significantly torn and damaged balls being removed from play quickly, and it ended up that almost any damaged ball was allowed to stay in play. In some cases balls that were almost torn in half were glued back together overnight and returned to play the next day.
What I found interesting is that clearly a lot of robots were damaging balls and none of the robots were being penalized for it, and there didn’t seem to be any inspection for mechanisms that might cause damage.
The safe thing is to assume that 1) officials might ask you to cease and desist if your mechanism damages balls and 2) balls are going to get damaged and your mechanism needs to handle that.
That was our painful lesson from 2020.
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“This device may not cause harmful interference”
Okay, fair, that’s a reasonable request
“this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation”
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