16th FRA General Meeting - 3 February 2007
Minutes of the 16th meeting of the FRA governing body
3rd February 2007
1. Apologies for absence
2. Present
G Smith, A Kane, M Lumb, T Wright, K Aston and K Pannell
Also present S Johnson.
3. Website
Changes have been made to our forum as we had to move server at Christmas. The FRA web site and forum is now in one place.
Our administrator and moderator of the forum has been changed and our thanks and appreciation go to Ed Hoppitt and Stu Barnwell for looking after the forum so well.
4. Championships for 2007
Applications for the running the 2007 championships were approved.
A. UK featherweight championships - Class 2F arena to be run by Roaming Robots.
B. European Feather championships - Class 2F arena to be run by Robochallenge.
C. UK heavyweight championships - Class 3 arena to be run by Roaming Robots.
5. New arena guidelines
New Arena Guidelines (3.0) were approved after a short discussion as they had already been adopted by XFM, Robochallenge, Robots Live and Roaming Robots.
6. Electric heating of Pneumatic systems
Due to the popularity of electrical fan heaters to heat up gas bottles and associated equipment, it was decided to ban this practice with immediate effect for the following safety reasons.
A. Event electricity supply is usually a limited one. Problems have occurred with failures of supply due to excessive demand. It was decided that this was an unsafe practise.
B. Gas bottles are being left unattended during heating and even when under filled the bottles will attain pressures far higher than is permitted by the build rules. The potential for injury is high.
7. Trials of Lithium batteries in heavyweights
Approaches have been made by two teams wanting to use lithium batteries manufactured by A123 systems in heavy weights. A decision was made to permit the two teams to run initial trials and the information gained should be made available to everyone if the trials are successful. Event organisers will need to approve their use for every event during the trials.