Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Whatever happened, has happened.

We as a community do not need to speculate on why it happened. We don't really even need to postulate on how to keep it from happening again. What we need to do is trust in the number of really great people who are working on it, and focus on moving forward in a positive way as a community.

How we as a community conduct ourselves now will define our collective character. Can we move forward in a constructive manner?

My personal thoughts are here:
http://blog.iamjvn.com/2012/04/react...ebrations.html

I had a great time at the FRC Championship, and I hope everyone else did too. Good experiences can happen even when things go badly. Let's make this into a good experience.

-John

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

I just want to say thank-you for saying that.

The Volunteers and Staff who deal with this aspect of the competition (FTA, FTAA, CSA's, etc.) have a very strong passions for what they do. These guys really want to get every robot working on that field, and it hurts them too whenever a team runs into problems, such as what happened on Einstein.

I personally have put my full trust behind them. I have never doubted there calls, and I feel others should do the same.

So I agree, as a community we need to let these people do their jobs, and give them our full support and trust, so they can Improve FRC and give us the best possible experience the can.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

I think a lot of people needed to be reminded of just that.

Oh, and welcome back, JVN!

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

I believe that this will be remembered as a watershed year for FIRST

There are things that will change after this year.
There are many intelligent people cogitating on the season.
We will engineer a better solution.

This was a great game this year. The winning alliance were teams with 15, 16, and 17 years in FIRST.
The universe conspired and after all is said and one, the result was inspiring.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Everyone has a right to be upset that it had to come to a failure on the biggest stage in FIRST, with the founder and his second in command becoming as distressed as the teams on the field, for networking problems that have persisted since the inception of the control system.

That doesn't mean you should question the integrity of the organization we support so fervently. I don't question that FIRST is looking into this seriously, I just wish this was made more pressing before now.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Yes. We found that it was very difficult to triple balance when we never had had three moving robots at the same time... In all seriousness, we desperately wanted to triple balance but the communication issues our alliance experienced made this impossible. Both 1114 and 2056 were dead for significant periods of all three matches, while 4334 was motionless for the entire first match.

---

The issues of Einstein 2012 were highly unfortunate. There's no sugar coating it. For the rest of my life, I will never forget the looks on the faces of team members of every team down there. Not just the losing teams, but the winners as well. No one was happy about what happened. We all felt so helpless. Everyone was trying to console each other, but there was nothing anyone could say other than "it's not right".

The most striking moment for me was when 2056's six year alliance captain, Isaac Hunter, looked at me and said "Karthik, can't we do something about this? We can't just let this happen." I was left speechless. I'm used to being the person who always has something to say to make people feel better. But at that moment all I could conjure was "There's nothing we can do. It's over."

The silver lining of this incident was the enduring spirit of gracious professionalism between the 12 affected teams. Everyone was looking out for each other, the lines between alliances became completely blurred. In many ways it felt like there was one giant 12 team alliance that won Champs together. I hope that gets recognized in some way or another.

The statement put out by FIRST after the event was very powerful. I commend Jon Dudas for taking such swift action. I'm confident that he will lead a thorough investigation into the events of Saturday afternoon. I hope that FIRST will prove my answer to Isaac to be wrong. I hope there is something that can be done to rectify what happened. In fact, hope is the wrong word. I know and have complete faith that FIRST is going to fix this. Let's just give them time.

In the mean time, I'd like to congratulate our 2012 Champions of the World, Teams 180, 25 & 16. These teams should carry that title with both honour and pride.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

It was completely unacceptable

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

I would just like to note that this thread started as "were the issues handled correctly" not "were the issues acceptable". I think everyone agrees that we would rather a working Einstein, and matches will all robots working. The question is, was there anything FIRST could have or would have done, given the situation?

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

I believe that, on the day, FIRST (as far as we know) did what it could to fix the issues on Einstein. The real problem is, though, that these problems had been apparent for the past few days, weeks and even years, and FIRST and its top employees took every opportunity to blame communications issues on the teams until this issue made them finally realize that there was another problem. If they had actually addressed the issue earlier, this wouldn't have had to happen.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Given the overall situation (extended history of problems), no, the issues weren't handled properly.

Given the immediate situation on Einstein... Tough call, but I have to go with yes, under the circumstances.

Overall, the "it's not the field it's your robot" type of statements--and the fact that much of the time, doing something to the robot made the situation better--served to not get the problem addressed sooner. Overall, that's an issue. Sweeping a problem under the rug doesn't make it go away. It's better to face it head-on and try to run some tests--I know at an internship after some testing of a troublesome part we were able to tell a customer, "When properly set up, the whatsits perform as advertised. We see they haven't been set up properly in your situation." (We were also looking at possible alternative methods to perform the function of the whatsits in case of inability to set up properly.) If you think there's an issue, go for the root cause.

For the immediate situation, there are a lot of factors going into this one.
First, you have the published documentation. Replays are by field fault or true tie only under the rules. And you can't for sure say that this is a field fault (we're assuming that you're looking at only Einstein). So, by ruling it a field fault and replaying the first two semis matches, when there was no concrete evidence that it was a field fault, they did do their best to accommodate teams. Positive point.
Second, you have the big picture. Looking beyond just Einstein, the robots worked better on the divisional fields. This puts the weight towards it being a field fault, so more replays should have happened. Negative points.
Third, you have the schedule. The Championship traditionally runs over--the only question is, how far? By issuing more replays, you lengthen the time--and shorten the night out--and possibly force teams to choose between staying or heading for home in time to get some sleep before Monday's return to the daily grind. This balances out the big picture look, so you do limited replays. Positive point.
Fourth, the weather. In bad weather, staying inside is the place to be--and you don't want to be running to vehicles in a hailstorm. But, it has the potential to interfere with all types of electromagnetic radiation, including the field control system wireless. The thing is, most electronics will be built to handle that interference these days, because it's a known potential issue. So that's a moot point (other than the keeping people inside because of weather part--a positive but unrelated point).

With the scale being balanced like that, it's time to play "benefit of the doubt" and "20/20 hindsight" cards and say that FIRST handled the immediate Einstein issues as best as they could under less-than-ideal circumstances, but needs to be more proactive in looking into possible root causes when untraceable issues crop up in large-ish numbers.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Does anyone have a full field video that shows the scale of the issues?

From watching the web cast only I wasn't clear that everything I've read here was quite as bad as I've seen.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

The way in which those of you who were a part of the 12 team alliance are expressing how you dealt with and handled the pressure and frustration, is recognizing the qualities of champions in each of you. You are bringing this recognition to yourselves in ways that show true leadership and reflect the integrity of the experience. What happened was horrible. How the 12 teams responded was magnificent.

Jane

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

It is not possible to change anything that has happened and under the circumstances everyone tried to make the correct decisions and behaved extremely well considering the drive and emotions present. We can't change what has happened but we can work together to understand the problem with facts and then design a solution. Those of us who have designed protocols and done in depth analysis of network traffic all know the performance is probabilistic and there are no guarantee performance metrics for this type of network. The cost advantage and ease of implementation for this hardware is significant and has to be balanced with the performance. There is no question that there are many hazards that exist in drive station software and also the CRIO basic design that were exposed by the level of network traffic that was present this year. There is a real difference between a design that works every time and one that works most of the time.
To solve this problem and move ahead we need to divide the problem into a couple of pieces.
First we need to find and remove the software hazards that make the driver station and the CRIO vulnerable to missing packet and possible lockup conditions. Some of these hazards may have been in the software for years but really were exposed by the level of network traffic this year.
Second we need to make a realistic model of the network traffic by in depth recording some trial events and looking at the options for network configuration that will improve the overall performance or issue clear limits that will bring the performance into an acceptable range. The quality of some of the wireless hardware may in fact play a major role in this analysis.
Let’s focus on finding solutions that after all it one of the life lessons FIRST is all about.

Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?
 

Well said
Maybe we'll stop hearing how it is not the field and it must be our robot. The anxiety that Dean and Woody experienced was a small fraction of what the finalists and other teams have been experiencing.