Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Great idea! And how about free registration to Championship?

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Now that might take off a little bit of the sting;)

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

As far as I'm concerned, you guys won, no taint. Bask in it, enjoy your time as world champs, and use it for recruiting and outreach. But the other three teams on Einstein didn't lose, FIRST did. I mean, why should we punish you guys when all's you did was seize the opportunity FIRST provided you? Any of us would've done the same, and Newton actually did, since 1717/469 were knocked out by comms in the semis same as we were on Einstein. FIRST was the real loser here, the real tainted player. If they want to recover, they'll have to make it so that every robot can always connect to any field, no matter how many packets of data go back and forth between robot and drive station.

This perspective is definitely something everyone should see, but at the same point, they should have warned us ASAP about the tornado, during the match commentary. Natchez and his brother were in the 118 temporary pit, and recognized the tornado as soon as they heard it. They got as many teams as they could convince to leave off of the field and into a windowless area. The rest of the thousands of people had no such opportunity, and if that tornado had touched down by the dome instead of Busch Stadium, it could be a very different story. We were not safe inside the stadium itself, nor would we have been safe in the hallways. I think FIRST now has another change to start working on in the off-season, and that is disaster preparedness.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Maybe move to one channel per team instead of 6 teams per channel? Implementation of QOS would also be a really good idea!

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I know that 1717 was out due to coms in the quarterfinals, but I don't remember them being in our semifinal match against them when we beat them. I'll review the videos we have of it and report back.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I remember one match where both 1717 and 330 were immobile at the same time. Both came back later in the match, but I want to say that 1717 dropped again shortly afterwards.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Our scouters were bellowing "1717'S DEAD! 1717'S DEAD!" in the quarters and the semis. I'm pretty certain 1717 was dead for most of both semifinal matches, and I remember Beachbots dying in a match as well.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Having worked in large groups of people in a management sense, the LAST thing FIRST should have done was make an announcement. Why? Because this would have created a panic that could have easily taken more lives by a human stampede.

Just be thankful no announcement was made and nobody was injured at the event.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I wonder why these issues only surface in eliminations? I can't remember another time 1717 wasn't working. Makes me think back to Leeland's comments in other threads, proposing something to do with the increased network bandwidth of highly capable teams (image processing, cameras, etc...)

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

That's the current thought here in Houston. We had two cameras, six light sensors, two string pots, and at least three encoders. No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of data. I can only assume other teams had even more going on, especially with 1717's swerve and dual intake. However, this theory falls apart with 4334, who didn't have the same number of sensors and still had comms drop. Perhaps the other two robots hogging the data dropped them, but I don't know enough about networks to be 100% sure. This is just what I hear from our programmers. I would like to investigate it further, but as I said somewhere else, at Lone Star we couldn't replicate either Connecticut's or Florida's issues. At this point I feel like FIRST should scrap the whole wireless system and start from scratch.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

There still might be something to this. In our shop we noticed that our controls could lag a little if we had all of our data running so we implemented a button on our controls that enables and disables data (and data defaults to OFF). Essentially, we don't send any data to our dashboard unless we push a certain joystick button. We also set our cameras to use the lowest quality and resolution that we can tolerate. We also made our data sending function only run a couple of times per second rather than every time through the main loop.

Essentially, we noticed that bandwidth usage could be a problem and we tried to optimize our robot's bandwidth usage down to the minimum.

Still, I don't think it can explain 118 sitting completely dead for the whole match. That was a truly tragic thing to see and I sincerely hope this problem is solved for good by next year.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

It is up to each team to ensure they design their robot to work under all relevant conditions. However, a team should not need to have five other high performance robots with high data demands and a full field to test their robot. Such system level issues should be addressed by whoever provides the FMS.

We were in a match at Alamo where 148 sat dead throughout. The probability that they made the kind of mistake that would cause this is extremely small.

It is unfortunate that it took causing so much pain to an outstanding group of teams, in such a public way, to get FIRST's attention. I hope that FIRST does fix these problems before next year to make their pain worth something.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

As far as I know we didn't turn down any of the video quality settings for the video stream to the driver's station.

We had:
1 camera
3 encoders
2 breakbeam sensors
2 pots

But all of the processing was left to the cRIO, we didn't offload any of the processing to the driver's station. The only thing that was being output to the driver's station would be the video feed and whatever is the normal packets for sending/receiving joystick inputs.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

The dome is probably one of the safest places to be in St. Louis, besides underground, during a tornado.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Please allow me to respectfully disagree. The Jones Dome has a disaster plan in place that includes how to handle a nearby tornado and, although I can not find the plan online anywhere, I suspect that the plan calls for partial shelter-in-place and partial evacuation to the tunnels when practical. The plan should not, and probably does not, call for withholding information from the people who will be directly affected.

In my view, what should have been done is that the field level should have been evacuated to the tunnel area leaving the floor bear and the people in the stands should have prepared for the roof to blow off and the glass in the exterior to shatter .... I don't really know if that is to shelter-in-place or proceed orderly to the tunnels; that is why the disaster plan is in place. FIRST should have followed the Jones Dome Disaster Plan.

Consider this, if you were at a Rams game and it sounded like a train was about to hit the stadium, do you really believe that it is right to let the players, staffs, & others remain on the field and hope bad things don't happen when there is very good shelter only a few hundred feet away. Also, if we enacted a "hush hush" policy in these circumstances, it seems unfair that we would not warn the people who decided to go to the bathroom or get a hotdog in a highly glassed area.

The roof blowing off a dome is a real fear and when a couple of panels get ripped off, things escalate in a hurry. In a dome, being under the primary roof is the first or second most dangerous place to be located.

Now, please allow me to defend my actions. I was on the floor and heard the sound of a train about to run into the Jones Dome from all directions. Knowing that bad things were happening outside and the fact that I did not have my handy crystal ball with me, I took action to remove participants and patrons from underneath the primary roof and into an "enclosed" area. First, I identified where people could go and then encouraged them to move to the tunnels; okay, I did not encourage the Robonauts but demanded the Robonauts get a move on it. I texted all of the Robonauts mentors (we had a group set up so it only took me a few seconds to text them) and asked them to get everyone to shelter. FIRST, obviously having their crystal ball in hand, told people that everything would be okay ..... just trust us. In review, I suspect my actions were more closely in line with the Jones Dome Disaster Plan for tornadoes than FIRST's actions.

When I read things like "the LAST thing FIRST should have done was make an announcement" because we can't trust people, I wonder what America is coming to,
Lucien