Good: Passing tubes in the air is legal! Woo hoo! This is seriously cool and I’m really glad this happened.
Bad: Mini bot rules AGAIN. FIRST craftily outlaws “prepunched” aluminium and overtly states that supporting FIRST means giving money to Lego:
Supporting FIRST means supporting FTC and FLL and their kits
Oh well. Win some, lose some.
“<G39> ROBOTS and FEEDERS may not SCORE on opponent’s PEGS or de-score opponent’s GAME PIECES.” LOL thought that was kinda a given.
And “<G49> ROBOTS may not attempt to POSSESS a GAME PIECE that is being POSSESSED by an opponent another ROBOT.” Seems to me you cant hunt people down for tubes anymore, well back to the drawing board :mad:
What makes you say this?
You can have a robot play Quarterback and pass to other alliance members. I’ve personally been looking into an efficient shooting system myself.
yea we get to throw tubes my team already been practicing just in case this happend
“<G49> ROBOTS may not attempt to POSSESS a GAME PIECE that is being POSSESSED by an opponent [strike]another[/strike] ROBOT.”
We’ve always been able to throw, the trick had been close-proximity passing between robots. Previously <G49> outlawed any two robots possessing the same game piece; now it’s just between opposing robots. (You can hand-off, just not steal.) We were hoping this’d happen!
Tangent: still no maximum force on the minibot target. Still a little worried they’re going to regret that…
This rule already existed, just before it applied to your partners as well.
Its Funny how a sIngle statement can make you lose any and all respect you once had for a group or entity. Just sayin’, interpret that as you wish.
Woops, totally misunderstood/misread Chris’s comment.
Nvm,
Sunny
Apparently because I prefer to support a different mid-level robot program I no longer support FIRST. Thanks GDC for clearing that up.
I will continue to support FRC but I won’t be supporting FIRST anymore.
Please tell Dean that I will not be calling my team a FIRST robotics team.
I guess I will no longer be running for a Chairman’s award either because the thought of starting (hypothetical situation here) 20 VRC teams in India and the Philippines instead of FTC would apparently get me nowhere!! Yay! These types of things are good to know before I waste my time promoting science and technology through any media possible. Very excited to finally have a concrete idea of where FIRST stands on these types of issues though. /sarcasm.
Excuse the language or not, but that is a load of BS. This’ll be my last comment on this issue though. Call me a fanboy or over exaggerating if you want too.
Its the “and their kits” part that gets me. We’re supposed to use the money we’ve raised to buy kits for a completely different program just to make sure the producer of said kits stays profitable?
Well, if the score gap was really large, and you had some extra pieces left in your feeder station, you could have (before the ruling, of course) thrown the game pieces over the feeder station wall onto one of the nearest opposing alliance’s pegs to shorten the scoring gap.
I completely agree with you there!
I would like to convey my disgust, but I think IndySam or Akash’s statements are enough.
I dont get how that was on topic at all…
I’m surprised it took FIRST so long to issue this clarification, it had seemed to me like FTC or raw materials was the intent all along.
That said, I think FIRST really missed their own “culture change” boat with the FTC limitation. As Dave wisely said,
Making FRC teams buy FTC kits sells maybe 1000 FTC kits, and ultimately doesn’t change the status quo. Chances are most teams that want to help with other robotics competitions are already involved with things like FLL, FTC, Vex, Botball, BEST, etc. I would be willing to bet that most FTC teams are associated with FRC teams. On the other hand, most Vex, Botball, BEST, etc teams probably aren’t. Wouldn’t it have been neat if part of the challenge had been to reach out to one of those other competitions, and get them involved in the FRC challenge? If you’ve ever done an FRC robot demo at an FLL/Vex event, there are so many kids who are fascinated by the “big robots.” It would’ve been awesome to reach out to those teams. I understand there might be difficulties implementing this… there are always are! Who knows… FIRST might’ve even got a couple new FRC teams!
2 cents. As always, you’ve gotta keep rolling with the punches. 
Words cannot fully express my disgust at the real reason for the Minibots.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the concept. The execution? Well, I’d say something, but most of what I’d probably say falls under the “unprintable” category.
EDIT: Most of what I have been thinking has already been said and will leave it at that.
Though I do wonder at how the minibots supposed to expand the FTC program. The build season is certainly not the time to help start an FTC team, so teams either already have local FTC teams to work with, or they will be building their own minibot with their own materials. Either way, I see no expansion in the program.
It really disgusts me that I’m forced to use the crappy music player on my Droid X…why couldn’t Motorola just use Apple’s player in their code instead?
You get the point…