FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

2016 Season Easter Egg

Tuesday night, I had a good time answering questions and judging game pitches on First Updates Now (FUN). Thanks, FUN, for inviting me to the show!  

I also revealed a little Easter egg from the 2016 season that, I believe, no one in the community had picked up on yet. And Easter eggs no one knows about aren’t much fun at all.  

You’ll remember that the History Patches we gave out to teams at events last season were different from week to week, with each week (along with District Championships and Championship) having a different number on it, DC, or C. Also, each patch was a different color. The color chart is below: 

Cognizant readers will recognize this as the resistor color code, used to identify the value of a resistor in ohms using color stripes on the component itself. Yep, the resistor color code. 0 (Black) and 8 (Grey) are missing, because we didn’t have patch-worthy events those weeks, with our unusual Week 0.5 event being rounded up to 1 for patch purposes.  

This was the idea of Toby Clarke, FRC Program Manager. If you watch the FUN video, you will see that the hosts, Tyler and Collin, were much less excited about this than I was for some reason. Either they, or I, need to get out more often. But I’m realizing now this revelation may be more exciting in larger font, all caps, italics, and with two exclamation points. Especially if you imagine hearing a cymbal crash when you get to the exclamation points. 

IT'S THE RESISTOR COLOR CODE!!  

The 5 Strategic Pillars of FIRST

Also on the show I touched briefly on the ‘5 Strategic Pillars of FIRST’, developed by our president, Don Bossi, and his senior staff. These are the pillars we are using to guide our long-term efforts. You can take a look at the end of the video if you want to get a quick overview of these, but Don will be doing a guest FRC blog in July going into more depth. It will be worth reading when it comes out.

A ‘New’ Original and Sustaining Team?

We were contacted by a member of FRC Team 250, Dynamos, from Albany, NY, USA asking about Original and Sustaining teams. Teams declared ‘Original and Sustaining’ by FRC are pre-qualified to attend Championship in recognition of their long and unbroken dedication to the program. The team member, Brendan Murphy, indicated that Team 20, The Rocketeers, who had already been identified as an Original and Sustaining team, actually became Team 250 at some point, before Team 20 and Team 250 split several years later to become two separate teams. So, it makes sense for us to recognize Team 250, who shares the early history of Team 20, as an Original and Sustaining team also. Welcome aboard, Dynamos, and thanks for your long-term participation!

Frank