Vendor or item specific rule work arounds increase costs to teams

Technical Technical Discussion
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First I want to say I don’t think wcp or first has any nefarious purpose behind this, I don’t even think the implications were considered when writing the rule. BUT ever since I saw the kraken adapter board I was VERY suspicious that FIRST would go about its legality in this way.

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Yes motor and motor controllers are controlled in this way because it is a direct safety hazard to have motors or controllers that can have unknown effects when disable or they loses power or have a firmware issue. THIS IS NOT THE SAME. Teams have the ability to implement EXACTLY what the board enables you to do. i am all for raising the floor and giving teams more options and think the kraken adapter board is a fantastic product. But don’t limit the options for team to implement the same thing themselves for far cheaper.

If it’s legal to power a cancoder off of a fused power tap from a motor controller, let it be legal. don’t limit teams to this product that as of right now is backordered and not available to everyone. I REALLY do not want the rule book to start popping up with different vendor specific item rules that allow teams to bypass other restrictions in the manual.

At its core this is an item that you can buy that allows you to bypass the R621 rules on powering devices . We all know frc is expensive, let’s not make it more expensive by creating rules in this manner that in my opinion is just a way to spend money so you don’t have to abide by R621.

Again, this is not an attack on WCP or FIRST, I truly believe the implications and end result where just not considered when writing this rule.

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Or if there is a vendor-specific rule, make sure that item is either in the KOP by default and/or available in sufficient quantities in FIRST Choice.

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So, will these parts be available prior to the end of build season? Wasn’t there another rule that to be considered a COTS part there had to a “sufficient” quantity available for teams to purchase? The text below is vague enough that the part should be legal by the rules but…

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Looking at you [insert FRC part here].

This is an issue with many vendors, i.e. the Falcon 500s, Neo Vortex/Flex, now also parts like the Bag Motor as Vex will not sell them anymore. So FIRST doesn’t really follow this as a hard answer fast rule. It’s not like those parts are suddenly illegal overnight when they go out of stock, because they were legal COTS when teams bought them.

So until we can get some clarification on those items I think this may fall in the same camp. It’s a stock issue in many cases and “sufficient” is too subjective because it’s never truly sufficient unless every team could buy one or more (enough for a full robot) and no vendor would stock that way. They’d end up with massive overstock.

There’s some happy middle ground somewhere. Have no clue where it is though and if I was a vendor I’d always be on the cautious side for stocking. FIRST competition parts are a niche and unless you have educational programs you can recycle old overstock into, you get stuck with weird stuff no one wants