How? Would such an LED strip not have that preterminated cable soldered to it?
What exactly is the GDC banning here, and why? Is anything soldered together considered illegal as a nonfunctional decoration per this ruling? If that’s the case, then R24b is utterly pointless since cameras are guaranteed to have solder somewhere in their materials.
On the other hand, if that’s not the case and the ruling is just banning students from doing any soldering their nonfunctional decorations (oh the humanity!), then I guess I should set up a shop where I solder together lengths of LED strips with 3 wire connections and sell them as pre-terminated cables to VEX teams.
To the contrary, R27 limitations of manufacturing, attachment, etc. have historically not been applied to R24 nonfunctional decorations.
Here is a Q&A where the GDC explicitly ruled this exact scenario as legal:
@Cooper_614A even used his soldered together speaker driver electronics at worlds a few years ago (after being approved by the GDC). Heck, if we’re going to suddenly start saying that R27 applies to nonfunctional decorations, are we banning stickers next, since they utilize adhesive, which R27 specifically bans?
Welding, soldering , brazing, gluing, or attaching parts to each other in any way that is not provided within the VEX platform is not permitted.
What exactly are we trying to accomplish here? How does this improve the student experience? To borrow terminology from a certain other robotics competition, how does this new ruling make VEX more inspiring for students? Personally I thought these LED strips made robots look significantly cooler and thus increase the inspiration factor of VEX. As a former longtime competitor, and as a current longtime head referee whose job it is to enforce these rulings, I have no answers for these questions. I reached out to the GDC email more than a month ago hoping to get some answers, but got silence.
Thus, what I’m left with is a scenario where a student will inevitably show up at inspection with some cool soldered LED lights attached to their robot that clearly are nonfunctional decorations, and I get to be the one that tells them that they have to rip them all off before they can participate this year. This is disheartening and demotivating for me as a referee.
To the GDC I ask: Please reverse this decision, or at the bare minimum give the reasons behind this change, because unlike many recent well written and reasoned Q&A answers, the reasons for this one escape me.