I’m lead electronics and media on my team and its my senior year. Every day I have a free block followed by a video production course, neither of which are efficiently used by myself (thanks senioritis). I was wondering if there was any demand for instructional / “how to” videos about FRC topics like electronics, troubleshooting, safety, etc that could be used to give new/incoming team members a quick lesson on FRC topics. Please fill out the poll and if you have any specific requests please share below!
Yes, these videos would be something useful to new members
No, there are better ways to learn / I would not watch them
I voted yes, but this is an effort that MANY teams have duplicated over the years.
A more valuable endeavor might be to consolidate all of the how-to libraries into one searchable index or database that anyone can easily find and/or is well enough advertised so that a broad audience knows about it. This could be a simple as a youtube playlist.
+1 to this. It can be very hard to find a video for something very specific on youtube. If one team made a set of high quality videos and then compiled them in one place that would be very helpful.
You can find a lot of videos and information about electronics and just about everything else on thecompassalliance.org. I’m all for teams helping raise the floor in any way possible, but make sure you’re actually helping and not just congesting and confusing.
Be sure to include even the things you don’t use but know how to build, manuals and documents are great too! manuals can just be swiped from the company websites or created by you for specific needs. One day they will be needed!
Just go for it! No need for a poll. Just monitor CD to see what new teams ask about most and address that need. Or take note this competition season what people think is cool about your robot and make videos about that. If your videos are useful to people, they will find an audience. See our youtube channel for examples. We have a 13 episode series on building a west coast drive train, and a 3 episode series on building quality bumpers. Is everyone going to like what you do? No. But, that’s not really the point. The point is to be helpful to those folks who need it.
Be aware, however, that there are people in the community who will nitpick and troll you. It was a disappointing surprise to me that people enjoy pointing out mistakes in public rather than sending a discrete PM. You have to be prepared to let it roll off your shoulders and be graciously professional in return.
Is pointing out mistakes publicly bad? It’s really hard to maintain any of this documentation so having potential problems pointed out in the forum is useful for teams that might be using the guide before updates can happen.