I have a couple things to say here. I held off on posting last night, but this needs to be said.
Let’s start from the top.
I was new to discord, and not aware that that stuff happens regularly. There was a single individual where issues extended beyond that, and DRow took care of it. I have literally never emailed the RECF.
A couple of points here
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Never has an idea been stolen. Only innovated upon. I would never steal any designs. Of course, it is very hard to prove either side of this. That’s why in the real world engineering notebooks have real witnesses and can be used in a court of law to prove when an idea was invented.
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In every instance where I have taken inspiration from someone, I have credited them. The description in my cube lock video mentioned a team I saw something a bit different but sorta similar work on. In my Intake thread, I said,
My tray slider was legit just something I CADed and posted. I have done the same with 2 other designs of tray sliders. There was no need to credit anyone, as it was a design that I worked on during that day, using principles I used on my cascade lift last year, such as spacer sliders.
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The phrase “
stolen ideas from teams, very very slightly modified them without improving functionality, and claimed them as his own ideas.” could be used to describe every single team this year with a complex-style traybot. Meta designs are constantly evolving. No competent team makes their robot without a good knowledge and understanding of robots that have already been made and documented. If anyone doesn’t want mechanisms on their robot available as public knowledge, they shouldn’t take them to events. -
Designs I have released have not been the most complicated. The cube lock was a simple 4-bar linkage. The 3-point intake was a triangle. The tray was just a spacer slider. Team\,A does not own the concept of triangles. That would be dumb. I refer readers of this post to this Wikipedia entry.
Patent troll - Wikipedia -
Every single damn time I post a design, whatever it be, I am accused of
stealingorleekingTeam\,A. If I were to post a tutorial on how to build a good chassis, I’d be willing to bet that a not insignificant number of people would suddenly be of the mind that Team\,A owns the concept of wheels.
A few more points here.
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This was 100% taken out-of-context. When I revealed to the VTOW discord server my design for a cube lock, it was stated that it was overly-complicated and not good. To a number of people, I sent that text blob about my sister team. I stretched the truth to make it appear as if my design was a better one than it actually was, because people were much more likely to trust Team\,A 's design than my own. As someone complaining about me taking screenshots out of context, this is quite hypocritical of you.
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I sent these in DMs so that that wouldn’t be public. I did NOT want my faulty statements in any sort of public record, because of their incorrect nature. I did not want to confuse anyone in an instance such as this one as to what the truth actually was. Note the use of a wink emoji, which I used to indicate that the text I had written wasn’t what the actual truth was. The full matter of the story is this. I CAD hundreds of designs. I have no friends or life outside of robotics. This 4-bar piece was one of them. I had my doubts about if it would work or not. After like 5 of my other designs had failed, I noticed my sister team did something similar to one of my designs. While yes, I would not have built this if they had not built their similar concept, they didn’t give me the idea of this design. This leads into my next point
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That was a DM. Generally speaking, it’s not cool to do stuff like that publicly, especially when you know for a fact that what I said in said DM wasn’t to be taken out of the context surrounding it.
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The reason that my messages have been “
since deleted” is that after you and your friends made me not feel safe still being on Discord, I used a script to clean up everything. I got rid of all of my messages in VTOW and DMs to all offending persons, including yourself. -
Barin explicitly requested that Team\,A remain unnamed. I am abiding by his wishes. I request that you blur out the team numbers and names in that image.
VEX is competitive. If someone does something that makes your robot no longer at the cutting edge of the meta, if you’re as great and amazing as you claim, go innovate more. If your robot would no longer be amazing if someone else saw it, you should not take it to a place where others can see it.
In case I haven’t hammered the point home yet, after the season is over, I would be more than happy to share my library of pictures of Team\,A's robot, to prove that I couldn’t have stolen anything. My only pictures are from a match in November against my former team. They are crappy side-angle shots. You can’t discern anything from them
I will also point out that the team leader from Team\,A said to me in a private message that the designs weren’t the same, right before I published my video.
This has all been an incredible force of stress in my life, and it making me strongly consider if I want to compete in VRC at all in the future, let alone if anyone would want to be on the same team as myself. I hope that the situation at least a small bit clearer now.