This year the GDC has made many interesting changes to the way license plates are. I am wondering why these changes were made and am strongly petitioning them to repeal the changes.
Only the correct color of license plate is allowed on the robot. Why was this change made? Many teams leave the other license plate color on successfully hiding it. I think this may have something to do with the plates falling off. Additionally, vex IQ pins were banned, which originally made license plates easy to use by stacking.
The GDC has banned custom 3d printed license plates. Many teams use these successfully and have no issues with them falling. I don’t see why the GDC felt the need to outright ban 3d printed license plates when other solutions could have worked to prevent license plates from falling off. Many teams had cool custom designs and I am sad to see them go away.
Overall, I am extremely sad over the GDC’s decisions over license plates this year. What are your thoughts?
Well, it seems like they’re going anti custom-plastic overall this year. 3d printed plate is technically custom plastic, so… But I don’t really understand their logic behind tho.
I feel that these rules for the licence plates are pretty ridiculous as they used to be fine with both as long as 1 was covered and also iq pins made quick swap useful and honestly did not need to be removed.
Very disappointed also, just recently made custom plates with embedded magnets for quick swap ability for worlds, but now they are just fridge magnets or something i guess. I know they probably have a reason but that was one of our only places to just have a little fun and be creative and now it’s gone.
Simple, a fair number of teams during High Stakes were denied AWP because their license plate was contacting the ladder. License plate in HS was non-functional. Making the license plate functional means this type of rule technicality will not impact teams.
Time to move on from 3D license plates, which albeit a creative expression of teams, had its issues and does not get us closer to permissible 3D printed objects. With limitation of plastics, I think constraints are moving back to favoring VEX structure elements.
You can still modify the official license plates to add magnets, or you can make custom license plates out of something that isn’t 3D printed. The rulebook has a picture of painted metal as a legal license plate.
My issue with this is that it was clearly stated that licenses plates were a non-functional part of the robot. It would be the teams fault if they failed to account for that in their autonomus routine, not the fault of the plates being non-functional. The ban on custom printed license plates, the changes to the plastic rules (all plastic counts towards the limit, including non-functional), and the banning of 3d printed decorations leads to to teams making bland, lifeless robots.
VEX has always been limited and constrained from a materials perspective. The challenges to succeed under these constraints is what led to abundant and creative uses of plastic, especially this past season.
GDC clearly wants to return to the core VEX materials and make plastic a rare accessory feature again. Solving problems with constraints is the point of the engineering design process. GDC must’ve felt that plastic was making it too easy to solve problems, or that they would rather see new solutions this season instead of more custom plastic additions. Plastic has been on the rise, now GDC wants to see what else teams can do to solve problems.
If the plastic “ban” is maintained all season, I expect we will see a ton of interesting and creative ideas using other kinds of VEX pieces to build things in ways the GDC is not even thinking of yet. But that will take time to develop, test, and show off new ideas over the season.
You can still customize license plates in all kinds of ways, just not as a 3D printed piece. Teams that dont want a “bland” robot will find new ways to express themselves this season.
This means that you can only have one color of license plate at a time on your robot and it cannot have a holder that is 3D printed. An example of this is that if you are on the blue alliance, you cannot have a red license plate on your robot, even if it is not showing. Also anything 3D printed is illegal on your robot, even if it is for decoration. So yes, quick swap license plate holders are not viable unless they are made out of VEX legal parts and the other colors license plate isn’t on the robot.
No 3D-Printed items are allowed on the robot at all. I personally think it is a stupid rule to add as it adds diversity to teams, makes them stand out, makes them enjoy robotics more with creative freedom.
I just have one important question for GDC.
Since stickers are not a legal construction component, and tape can only be used for wire management etc. and decorational purposes, and number plates are now apparently functional mechanisms.
Alright, so in the first place, banning 3D printed number plates really doesn’t help to make the competition more fair in any way. You could still vaguely make that argument regarding the plastic pieces in R25, but number plates??? How is anyone getting any sort of competitive advantage?? All that does is increase the usage and therefore purchases of official number plate sets
And given what I said before, analysing the rules such that stickers are banned. How does using custom stickers benefit anyone’s competition experience? It’s quite literally illegal to use custom stickers on your number plates as we would’ve done before.
I encourage the reader to realise that the GDC, RECF and VEX have close ties, and that we live in a capitalist society.
