With our 7 notes going into the season, we are unable to practice and do testing for almost a week. Should things really be like this in a program where we race against time? I understand that handling fragile game elements teaches teams useful skills for the real world, but constantly being on pins and needles to preserve the kit object or the limited ones we managed to get our hands on from the other side of the ocean is kinda depressing. I am tired of viewing this program as a logistics race or a competition of who can place orders faster while getting away with the order limits.
I’m curious about other teams’ experiences with their note stock and the current status of their notes. Sorry for my low energy tone, hope you have a great day!
I agree, anyway you put it, there is and always will be a numbers game and advantage to the program. I wish there was a way to level the playing field in respect to this. however, i don’t see one. I do wish there was a way to say if some component for example a motor, is not readily stocked, then no one can use that motor that season. That only works in my head though.
We got 10 official notes, and another 8 or so knock-off notes at the start. I think we’ve killed 3 notes (ripped in half), and we can see others are on the way and have tape around their problem zones. All of the knockoffs were out of spec, but hey, that simulates real game pieces out of spec, we can deal with that. But even then, 3 of them are so hilariously out of spec they aren’t usable.
Mostly we’ve just “Pan Fried” our notes, because of our top/bottom rollers for everything, just peeling away the skin, which isn’t that big of a deal.
So even though we have been more gentle on them than most teams I bet, we’re still down about 33% from what we bought.
However, we’ve confirmed we can pickup and shoot notes that are entirely broken into a noodle (but with reduces accuracy at distance), so can’t calibrate with them, but if we need to, we can still score them in a match.
FIRST has always had a supply issue with game pieces, with the exception of Fuel in 2017 (which were still used as packing material for years afterwards). The worst of which was the strap balls in 2009, where literally the day 1 of the season, the company that supplied them went out of business. FIRST has certainly gotten better, but it’s really hard to determine how many are going to be wanted/needed by teams.
Honestly, yes it kinda sucks to have limited game pieces, but I feel that it may add an element to the design process that is good. I think having to be careful about using what we have is important, and perhaps it will incentivize people to find better ways to minimize damage to the notes. Any challenge in FRC is also an invitation to innovation.
And on another note (pun not intended) which I hesitantly add, is that it does promote equity. However much I like to focus on equality and less so on equity (as I feel equity disincentives effort), I do understand that it is important for lower-advantaged teams to have some extra help. FIRST does an excellent job in this, and my team has benefited greatly from extra help that is given because of circumstantial obstacles. To get to my point, teams that are rushing to complete their robot in the last couple weeks before the competition have little time to worry about their game pieces. Trying to eliminate challenges of accessing game pieces in high quantities obviously gives team of higher caliber an advantage. Personally, I find this argument to hold little water as this is a robotics competition, we want to promote excellence. A more convincing argument to me would be that we should maybe focus our effort in more effective directions, and leave the dynamic as it is.
All that said, I would love to see some alternative/consistent options to buy game pieces, and I would not discourage anyone from trying to do this.
We were lucky and got a decent amount of notes (I think the max allowed on the first order and then another dozen or so on the second batch of notes)
Prior to our scrimmage we were lucky in that we had only opened 11 notes. Our first note we purposefully damaged as much as possible until it ripped used the glue that they used to try to repair 2020 power cells (discovered that did not work at all) and then just would tape the note until it split completely in two.
We then had another note that was split in half thanks to a team driving over it during their testing. So we had 9 notes in usable condition, all except for 1 are heavily tested and then we have the “control” note. It is used after calibrating with the bad notes to make sure if a new note is introduced we do not have any issues.
At our scrimmage another 4 notes were made unusable, so our “control” note went into rotation along with 2 of the notes from batch 1 and 1 from batch 2 with a new batch 1 and 2 note being used as our new controls.
I will say we get a lot less damage on our notes from our robot mostly it comes from our speakers edges being sharp and the note scraping on it on a slightly low or high shot. So idk if we just have been less abusive than other teams but we have had little issue and had getting notes been a tougher ask we would not have purposefully broken one or let other teams practice with them as easily as we did.
There is a certain amount of care that needs to be taken when designing mechanisms. This is somewhat difficult when FRC is a learning program, but it is possible to treat this as a team culture thing.
Yes we have had some fragile gamepieces over the years. The limited stock this year was concerning but imo not catastrophic for the program.
I think there was an interview after one of the many Red Bull Max Verstappen wins last year asking about Ferrari tire woes. The response was “well we design these cars (red bulls) to be nice on tyres so…”
Notes are expected to wear. Limited supply kind of stinks, but ultimately there is risk with abusing the gamepiece. (Knowing where the gamepiece abuse limit is is another matter, not easy)