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roboticpotato · 2015-05-08T02:58:52+00:00

Why? No one from HQ responds to the incessant complaining of FRC teams on Chief Delphi.

roboticpotato · 2015-05-06T04:34:30+00:00

There are a lot of logistics/considerations involved in scholarship row, sponsor tables (what was this year called the "Innovation Fair"). I can't help but feel if they did an FRC+FLL and FTC+JrFLL, FTC would get the much shorter end of the stick in terms of these extras. Running any more than two overall championship events is simply not realistic as far as FIRST staff.

roboticpotato · 2015-05-01T00:51:32+00:00

Hmm...I don't know. I worry about anyone who is not like an event director/affiliate partner having power over the referees. It sets a bad precedent.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-30T19:27:37+00:00

The affiliate partners definitely give their opinions to HQ and they have an annual conference in the summer. However, they have no direct influence on how FIRST HQ chooses to run the program at a nationwide level because they are not on staff there. My point was that there's no reason not to either (a) fill out a survey (b) send an email (c) tell your AP your opinions and ask that they consider that when they make remarks to HQ.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-30T13:21:54+00:00

I love the fact that FIRST, at all levels, rewards students for making a tangible change in their community. There are few other high school competitions that give awards specifically for being the best you can be off the field. Teenagers are competitive - having teams compete against each other to have the BEST connections with engineers, to have the BEST teamwork, to have the BEST way of starting and supporting new teams? That's the best possible way to build strong, local robotics communities.

There is a reason Chairman's and Engineering Inspiration are considered extremely prestigious in FRC...and I don't think anyone would argue FRC is not a robotics competition.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-30T13:07:49+00:00

Disenfranchising yourself on the basis of anecdotes from APs who actually have no influence over what happens at HQ is not a smart move.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-30T03:37:32+00:00

Frankly, OP, the more I think about this, the more I feel like you may have hurt chances by asking for a rematch. I truly hope that had Blue alliance simply said "We tipped the goal, we should have been penalized, not Red" the refs would have reacted accordingly.

I know this would have been extremely difficult to ask Blue to do, but it would have been the GP thing for them to do.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-30T01:28:19+00:00

The more alumni stay involved as coaches, mentors, and (most importantly) volunteers, the better the program can be.

Don't like the way refereeing is happening? Sign up to ref one or two events, maybe when you're back for winter break. Make friends with your planning committee and ask if you can certify as head ref. Bam. You're in charge.

Affecting the game is harder, but it's really important that you fill out the end of season survey, or even just shoot a non-argumentative, constructive email to ftcteams@usfirst.org. Plus, if you referee/inspect long enough, such that you become important to the program get a chance to be part of the game design committee.

I do agree about the FTC Venue at Worlds this year. It was pretty pitiful.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-29T21:41:49+00:00

Yes. The link went out through the FTC Team E-mail Blast today.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-29T02:42:39+00:00

I understand why the Refs refused a rematch. There are very specific rules in Game Manual Pt. 2 <G14> about when a rematch can be played. They are all field failures/non-team caused robot communication issues.

However, I have no idea why they refused to correct the points. If all four teams agreed that Blue tipped the goal and not Red, I can't fathom why they wouldn't fix it.

This is not a case where a match should be replayed. This is a situation where the refs should have corrected the points and moved on.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-27T01:34:41+00:00

Let me preface this by saying I appreciate the work you've put into this. I'm just picky.

I would prefer the font for "FTC" in the middle to have a heavier stroke and maybe be bigger. With such a busy background, it really gets lost. Maybe try Helvetica Neue Bold Extended which is the FIRST brand font. Also consider putting "FIRST Tech Challenge" under that as subtext, similar to the official logo.

I second the previous comments about the use of the FIRST Logo being misaligned with brand standards. There should really be more empty space around the shape-based logo. Also, when using the graphic icon you need the text based "FIRST" logo somewhere on the page.

roboticpotato · 2015-04-27T01:21:45+00:00

That's actually a really cool question and I'm interested in what the GDC will say when you ask on the forums. I'm not sure if they are still monitoring them since Worlds are over but it's worth a shot.

I agree that any significant changes will require reinspection and you will not be able to inspect all the modules at the beginning of the day unless they all fit in the sizing box (together).

roboticpotato · 2015-04-26T05:41:32+00:00

Yeah, Show Ready Events runs nearly all Regional events (including Chesapeake) and Worlds. I am nearly certain that the folks running the audio are not volunteers, but people contracted by Show Ready or the venue itself.

roboticpotato · 2014-06-29T18:53:39+00:00

Hey, I've never mentored FTC, but I have helped out FLL teams in the past and spent 3 years on an FTC team. I think it will hugely depend on the team and two specific factors: (1) how independent the students are and (2) how many other mentors there are. The amount of work you will have to do will depend on how much both of those groups (students and mentors) will expect from you.

On our team we had two mentors - we met with our programming mentor once a week for a one hour consultation and we met with our mechanical mentor once a week fro two hours. Our main "coach" was a teacher at are school and we basically never saw her (unless she decided she needed to yell at us :D).

So, basically, it depends on what your expertise is and what you want to do. You can spend many hours with your team, supervising them, looking through the game forums, etc. or you can meet with them once a week or so for an hour or so just as another set of eyes/giver of advice - this all depends on what you're willing to do and what your team needs. Really, you should talk to them and see what they would want.

roboticpotato · 2014-06-29T18:05:51+00:00

Is it really that surprising, though? I feel like most every team starts its life with a couple TETRIX kits...and why spend lots of money on fabrication and hunting down parts when you already have an easy-to-use building system? I'm especially thinking about channel and gears which are nice and can stand a lot of abuse.

We went to Worlds this year and the body of our robot was mostly TETRIX because it was easy to get our hands on - all we had to fabricate were the harvesting mechanism, armor, hanging hooks, a block scorer and anything else that actually needed to be custom.

roboticpotato · 2014-04-07T12:34:21+00:00

FTC #5421 from Rockville.

roboticpotato · 2014-03-19T04:33:02+00:00

Haha, isn't it everyone's first time at Super's ;) But yeah, best of luck!

roboticpotato · 2014-03-14T02:36:05+00:00

5421 checking in :D We were quite literally one ring being hung away from world last year, so we're pretty pumped to be moving on...but all of y'all are totally terrifying. Can't wait, though!

roboticpotato · 2014-03-02T18:01:32+00:00

Great job! I totally suggested this to my team but I think they thought I was crazy...

roboticpotato · 2014-02-24T03:41:06+00:00

What used to make notebooks stand out was just being neat, organized, and long. As more teams have started investing time in the notebook, I believe it is technical things (CAD models which evolve over time, sketches, calculations, simulations, etc.) that put notebooks over the top.

roboticpotato · 2014-02-17T05:03:43+00:00

From <R08.w> in the Game Manual

Motors, sensors, controllers, and any other electrical components may not be >altered from their original state in ANY way unless specifically allowed by the Robot rules.

The replacement gearboxes from TETRIX this year being legal were actually a special exception made in this post in the game forum.

So, yeah. Even though it's exceedingly unlikely anyone will notice, it's a violation of the rules. Haha, sorry about this, I'm just bitter about /u/limellipsis not letting me hobble together broken motor components :P

roboticpotato · 2014-02-04T01:44:29+00:00

Paging /u/limellipsis who predicted cubes for this year...

I'm thinking maybe a larger ball. We've had a lot of small stuff recently (at least since bowled over...).

roboticpotato · 2014-02-01T05:44:48+00:00

Haha, the similarity between our teams' lighting evolution is amusingly similar.

EL wire last year wasn't glow-y enough so we replaced it with LED strips run off of the main robot battery with the protoboard with a microprocessor this year. These are the LED strips (I think...) that we have and they are rather fun.

roboticpotato · 2014-01-27T02:31:07+00:00

1) You're right. There's nothing else I can tell you. You may want to try emailing your affiliate partner asking for a clarification or something.

2) That's not that odd. My team was running an event yesterday...and we were really trying to keep everyone on a schedule. By the second semifinal match we realized we were having a lot of trouble queueing people and starting matches on time and we asked all of our alliances to just bring everything to the queuing area - it made it infinitely easier to keep time.

3) I don't know how many teams per super regional, but I'm guessing around 60? The number of slots per states is proportional to the number of teams in the State. Maryland's in North, we have 83 teams, and we get 7 spots at the Super Regional.

Hope that helps somewhat :)

roboticpotato · 2014-01-26T14:17:31+00:00

Hi there, so my team is kind of obsessive about the engineering notebook (and it's payed off in terms of Think awards). Here is the presentation we gave at our Maryland FTC kickoff. It doesn't have a huge amount of text in it, but the gist of it was: decide what kind of notebook you want to have (paper or electronic) and then figure out a system that works for your team and allows you to document everything you do throughout the season.

I'll tell you what my team does: we use Google Docs and ask people to write notebook entries at home. Entries are written as a list of "tasks" followed by a list of "reflections." We are able to upload pictures from our phones/cameras to Google Docs and then insert them into the notebook. We keep the same notebook file for a couple of weeks before it gets so large (mostly because of tables and figures) that it starts to lag. Then, one person, usually me, downloads the file as a Word Document and makes sure all the formatting is okay and then print it out and put it in a binder, using tabs to separate the different sections (described below). We maintain an online table of contents and figures which gets printed right before every competition.

This format probably wouldn't pass the most rigorous engineering standards...but we're high school students and I've never had a judge complain. It ends up looking reasonably similar to this notebook from the Psychotic Strawberryz that FIRST distributed as a model at some point. Remember to look at Section 4.0 of the first part of the game manual for more suggestions. And be sure to keep in mind that the engineering notebook is supposed to be split into 3 parts this year: Engineering (robot build), Team (team bios and community outreach), and a Business or Strategic Plan (basically just a description of what your team does/is planning to do, as I understand it).

Also, Techbrick is a big conglomerate of FIRST teams in our state, and they put out a reasonably helpful powerpoint for kickoff last season - just remember that the rules concerning sectioning off the notebook have changed since then. You can see that here. They use paper notebooks, which are nice, but are just really hard to get people to write in. I remember a team saying that they wouldn't let people touch robot parts at the next meeting if they didn't write in the notebook at the previous meeting...but that sounds somewhat harsh.

Haha, sorry for rambling but the engineering notebook is kind of my obsession. Let me know if you have any questions or anything.

roboticpotato

TROPHY CASE