FRC Director Frank Merrick will be joining us to tell his journey of FIRST and to answer your questions live on the air!
Post your questions on this page. It could be anything about Frank, FIRST, or various food items! Please keep in mind that there will be some areas that Frank will not be able to discuss such as the 2016 game.
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I was lucky enough to meet one of the engineers at AndyMark who was on the FTC GDC and talked about how their missions get designed, which was REALLY interesting.
Who makes up the GDC? How does the GDC create and decide on missions/a game? Is the FRC GDC similar to the FTC GDC in that they come up with a few ideas/tasks for missions and let the engineers come up with a few designs that are easy to build with COTS parts and then come back to present them and the GDC decides on which ones to go with?
Where do you think FRC/FIRST will be at in 5 years? 10 years?
What will be the biggest positive (& negative - if any) change for teams this year (like how FTC switched control systems)?
I also know that you previously mentioned something about testing a format for webcasts at IRI this past year. Will webcasts be standardized this year with support from FRC? (I’m partially asking this since my regional asked me to help out with webcasting and I pointed them to a local video production company.)
To follow up on this - what about bandwidth constrained/prohibitively expensive venues like NYC? Apparently from what I understand they barely have enough to support FMS, let alone live webcast (probably due to venue charges more than infrastructure). Is there funding to support this?
Another question: what is holding us back from having a full field camera set up at each event to post match videos after events? It’s 2016 and I feel like it should be easily doable to get every match on YouTube.
Can you elaborate on some of the things FIRST HQ is doing to ensure a highly consistent experience for every team at each event?
In the past inconsistincies between the team experience at events was much higher, and I’d like to hear why appears to have become much better recently.
Quoted for truth. There was a very good setup in 2012 and 2013 where even if not separated by match, there are videos on YouTube with blocks of matches (not sure if it’s separated by days or just length restrictions) put up by FIRST. Why did this setup not return in later years?
There are 2014 videos out there on YouTube but they are tough to find again. 2015 had none. My question is also asking about having it at the regional and district events, but especially the championship.
For 2015, FIM and PNW (I’m pretty sure) have all the events up on YouTube with nearly every match available (there’s spotty issues with certain matches, at least in FIM).
New England has most of ours up to, but I believe that is just because of a dedicated volunteer rather than FIRST getting involved. Which is fine if it’s a consistent solution at every event (which it is not).
