FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Just saw this got posted on Tumblr:

Can anyone confirm? EDIT: It's confirmed. 2nd post.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Confirmed
This went out to FRC team main contacts via email this evening.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Team 4061 also received the e-mail from FIRST

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Oppos didn't see the other thread X_x
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=106084

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

"We will examine all of the facts, report our findings and ultimately solve any and all identified issues." so what are they going to do make all the teams come back just to play Einstein and see who should of really won? :confused:

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This was my concern. The season is over, there's not much they can really do at this point except wish us luck for next year. :(

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My question to Jon Dudas would be, "Why did it have to come to this?"

I think that is about all I can say about the situation.

Jane

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I think FIRST will give an auto qualification to all teams that were on Einstein for next year's championship.

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I'd like to see FIRST launch a legitimate investigation into the communications issues this year, on both sides. Robot and field.

Make a case study out of it, and put it to rest, then fix the issue, wherever it lies. Then we can all collectively learn.

-Nick

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

All I am going to say is that people need to be quiet about our so called "tainted win" and look at IRI and the 2013 season.

-JTN

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I wouldn't call it a "tainted" win. Everyone on that field had the same issue to one degree or another.

I look at it as, "Who has the best alliance", with an unannounced--and unplanned-for--factor contributing to that called, "Who maintains connection the best".

I also see it as, thanks to all the Einstein teams for finally calling FIRST's full, undivided attention to an issue that has been plaguing them for a while.

And I think the SPAM Raider Squad is one of the best sets of teams to come together and play the game. Comm issues or no comm issues.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

With the way things are going, I have a bad feeling about any potential Einstein replay matches on IRI. There is definitely going to be a bad vibe going about if 180, 16, and 25 don't win that time, and it would just be awkward. I feel like FIRST is handling it correct for now, and needs to investigate this deeply, and as for the champions, I like the idea of keeping the current Champions, but having all other Einstein teams be given a bid to the 2013 Championship.

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I know it's impossible to predict who will be going championships next season, but if giving teams an auto bid next season is meant to compensate, I honestly don't believe that is enough, especially for teams such as 118, 548, 16, 25, 180, 1114, 2056, 233, 987, who either already qualify or have about as much chance of missing championship as 217 did this year.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I couldn't have said it any better. The most disappointing thing about these random field issues is that FIRST has been seeing them and denying them all season long.

At one regional, they made a point to blame the multiple teams with random disconnects in the eliminations when the crowd began to react, even though the evidence was by no means conclusive.

It's absolutely horrible that the issues happened on Einstein field, in a way that was both obvious and large scale. I am glad FIRST is finally recognizing there is a problem, but they had weeks to years of observations that they were denying before this. It's a shame. At least the issues are finally getting the attention they need.

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I agree. If I were the IRI committee, I wouldn't want to put the 2012 World Championships in an awkward position. All four alliances had the potential to win, and even with no field issues, some luck going one way or another would have produced a different world champion.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

There were several team throughout the season with comm issues. I really hope FIRST finds a more robust com system. This should not have happened, especially on Einstein.

-Shout out to team 1619 who built and insane robot this year, and it connected in only 3 matches.

I don't think your win was tainted at all, though other alliances had possibly better single robots, you guys were the most extraordinary alliance with the best strategy and match play. The defensive play and ball starvation allowing great tele-op scores as well as the insane speed and reliability of your auton and balancing earned you the win.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I haven't heard a single person call it a tainted win. Granted, everyone would have rather had all robots working in all matchups, but they weren't. We'll see later at IRI, but I bet this alliance would win no matter what.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

sadly heres one

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I know others will disagree with me (and this is no way how the team that I am affiliated with feels, this is a purely personal opinion), but I do believe it was a tainted win. I mean absolutely no disrespect to the winning alliance; they were a fantastic set of robots. However, looking at the definition of tainted: Affect with a bad or undesirable quality. The matches were quite obviously affected with an undesirable quality, comm issues.

Again, I mean no disrespect and this is only a personal opinion, not that of the team number next to my name.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I mean... let's be honest here. Several robots did not move for part or all of their matches due to, as far as we can tell, factors entirely out of their control and/or knowledge. I certainly have no ill will towards 180, 16, and 25, and understand that they're probably feeling just as bad as everyone else right now, but it wasn't a fair fight.

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My disappointment in the situation is that the alliances were not able to perform to their full potential. Curie had a really intense finals, great teams on both sides, and I didn't notice connection problems. From what I heard coming from the crowd at Archimedes, that division's eliminations were also very intense.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I think the thing that people need to remember is that the winning alliance had comm problems as well, they affected everyone. As someone who was really pulling for 180, I freaked out when they dropped comms in the last game till just the last couple seconds.

While I wish that the matches would have been played out with all robots moving, I still think that the way 180, 25, and 16 played together was brilliant and they deserved the win. Now as for IRI, I think that replaying would be a bad idea, there is always luck involved wether or not comms are dropped and now with time to improve the robot I think that by then it wouldn't even be the same. I think that we should just learn that this is something we need to make sure doesn't happen in the future. What's done is done, every team played their heart out and while it is terrible that some people will never know if comm issues got them out, at the end of the day circumstances still provided for the winner. They made it to the finals and they won, a rematch would just be like trying to strip them of the crown that they fought hard for and I don't think that is right. I like the idea of inviting all of those teams back to worlds next year, but the results should be left as they are regardless of the other factors that poured into it.

All that being said I hope FIRST is going to look into finding a better comm system for 2013 and onward so that disconnects are less likely to happen anywhere from einstien to practice matches.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

The legitimacy of "communications problems are on your [robot's] end, not us" lost all of its weight when a team that won 46 of its first 47 matches suddenly stops working, didn't it...

Like in most cases, something will only be changed after it fails massively. Sorry it had to be like this, but maybe we will get the change needed.

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Comm problems have plagued FRC for years and and I have always had problems understanding why FIRST seemed to always want to blame the robots. There has to be a more robust way to do this. Jeez, I fly RC airplanes and you might have 10 birds in the air at the same time and there are no comm problems.
This has been my biggest frustration after almost 10 years in FIRST. Sure hope they get it fixed. It is horribly frustrating having put so much time into a robot and have the teams hopes dashed by field problems. We had other issues this year and had no field comm issues but we have had problems in the past(2010) and lost a fair number of matches because of it. I think it taints FIRST more than any alliances victory. I am so proud to be part of something this wonderful. Fixing these comm problems can only make it that much better.
BTW A great thanks to Dean and Woody. Great men with a great dream for our future.
Bruce

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

A lot of people are saying 16, 25, and 180 deserved to win anyway, but can anyone say that the other 3 alliances deserved to lose? Not at all, the winners were decided by a coin flip, and if it any of the other alliances were lucky enough, they would have won too under the circumstances. And if none of the alliances deserved to lose, did any alliance deserve to win outright? For me it was a tainted win, because no matter how I look at it I will still feel bad for the other alliances.

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A coin flip? Really? It's not like 16, 25, and 180 didn't have their own problems. Sure, there were issues, and there are reasons to be upset, but to call their win "tainted" is actually really disrespectful. They won and they shouldn't feel bad about winning. The only thing that this is accomplishing is doing exactly that, making the winning alliance question their win. The best thing to do right now is to congratulate everyone on their performance, and make sure in the future, we don't need to have these discussions.

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Perhaps it wasn't complete chance and the problems that occured had something to do with individual robots, but I will give alliances like archimedes the benefit of the doubt and say they really couldn't have done anything about it. If you switch a few variables I would say archimedes would have moved on, and on the other side the newton alliance might have moved on as well. It might not have been, but newton and archimedes were extremely unfortunate, and I feel bad for them. I do not feel like they should have lost at all. It was a tainted loss, and that means it was also a tainted win.

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There has been only one win that was actually decided by a coin flip. It was not in 2012. And it is the reason for the elimination-match tiebreakers that have shown up in 2011 and 2012, I think.

As I said before, the winners here were the teams that best dealt with the challenge that was nowhere in the rules but enforced by the conditions: maintaining communication with the field. It's a lot tougher than any other part of the competition if stuff isn't working, and should be easier than any other part if stuff is working.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I've posted in another thread already, but I just wanted to repeat myself here...

As you have seen in the letter from President Jon Dudas... FIRST is going to try to figure out what happened and make a solution. I fully believe that it's important to recognize each of the Division champion teams for their efforts on Einstein in some way... and then work on resolving the connection issues for next year.

I had no bearing on what happened, but I am truly sorry it did. I'm sure FIRST will make sure this never happens again.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

The only problem with this line of thought will be if there really were field problems that favored a specific alliance. In that case then the efforts of the teams to maintain communications were valuable to a point and the rest was dictated by their simple field interaction.

Personally I have already congratulated the victors. The game is just a small part of FIRST. Let's move beyond it.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Here are some of my thoughts about Einstein on the plane ride home last night that we can teach our teams:

1) S#*^ happens in FIRST and in the real world, so you had better be prepared to roll with the punches.

2) Things in life aren't always fair, but if you do your best then always hold your head high and be proud of your accomplishments.

3) All four alliances on Einsten this year were of IRI caliber and it is a shame that the field issues got in the way of what had the potential to be epic matches based on the division eliminations. We have all collectively put in thousands of hours, millions of dollars, gallons of blood sweat and tears into this season, but in the end it is just a game. And while the FIRST community debates things like field issues, FIRST's handling of Einstein or a "tainted" win, there is a family in St. Louis who is making funeral arrangements for someone who was watching another type of game and was in the wrong place at the wrong time while the Einstein field issues kept tens of thousands of us all safe and sound inside the Edwards Jones Dome. Perspective is everything.

I personally am going to take a cue from my new friends the Novak's and look forward to IRI and the 2013 season. FIRST now has to address and fix what has been a season long issue that was unfortunately put into a glaring spotlight on the world stage.

Congratulations again to Teams 180, 25, and 16 on being the 2012 World Champions.

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Those who win Championships are the ones who overcome ALL the hurdles...bad weather, bad calls by refs, bad conditions on the field...as it is in sports, so be it in Robotics. HEARTY CONGRATULATIONS to 16, 25, and 180! A well deserved win! Looking forward to either joining you or competing against you in 2013...you have set the bar HIGH!!! :D

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Re-quoted for truth. We all can learn something here
Through no fault of your own, some will think this. You deserved to win, and you did. Good job!
I truly believe that. Once I saw Dean trot over and get involved, I knew that there'd be bloody heck to pay if answers weren't forthcoming in the near future.
That is such an awesome statement. Where else can you say that those who won the world championship were good enough to compete in an off-season event*?

Don

*Well, maybe THE off-season event. But still.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Hi Guys,

I'm the coach for team 180 SPAM. I feel for the teams that had communications problems. We were also one of them when we switched from blue to red. We lost comms for a good 30-45 seconds in the second half of the last match and then connected for a last futile 10 seconds of play. We have had comm problems this year as well, and I worked very closely with Joe Hershberger to help find and solve (or at least patch) our problems.

At the South Florida Regional, we had a match where the field was having problems connecting to the other teams on the field and so our robot sat for a while. Even though everything was green and we never lost comms, our robot never moved. It turns out that our code had thrown an exception at one point and VXWorks had killed our main robot task. There is a network communications task however, that remained operational - thus, we never lost comms, but the robot was dead.

After talking with Joe, we found that we could tell the cRIO to reboot from the driver station if we saw a problem. On the charts tab on the driver station there are two lines that show the status of the system. There's one line for what the field or driver station is commanding and another line for what the robot says it's doing. When we looked at the logs, we could see that the line for the robot just stopped. It didn't show disabled or any other state, it just wasn't there. From that point on we made it a point to leave the charts tab open and reboot the robot in the event of a problem.

Now, fast forward to the Championship. After seeing 118 stationary in the first match I went over to share my sentiments about the situation and impart the valuable knowledge that I had gained over the season with them. I have no desire to win anything knowing my competitor was maimed because of something out of their control. They are a great team and don't deserve to not compete. I don't know if they ever used my suggestion, but I know that rebooting the robot was the only reason we moved again in our final match. I was also rebooting our robot every couple minutes when we were sitting for a while to make sure we didn't run into the same problems as at the SFR.

It seems to me that there is either a bug in the networking stack on the cRIO or in the field communications computer. Even until the last match, I would occasionally see networking errors on the diagnostics tab. I hope this can be rectified in the future and I'm sure FIRST is putting every effort forward to resolve this debacle.

As for the 180, 25, and 16 alliance I feel that we really were one of the best alliances out there. I feel that 16 was by far the best defensive robot at the competition. No matter who we went up against, 25 and 180 always had balls to shoot. It's a testament to 16's rugged design that they could even stay together with the incredible pounding they took every match. We never ran dry, while the other alliances were scrounging for ammo. 25 played brilliantly - both accurate and efficient. We were an alliance that worked well together and the cunning and experience of 25 and 16's coaches was invaluable in maintaining our advantage. I still can't believe the stars aligned to allow such an alliance to happen. It was an absolute pleasure to compete with both teams and I'm proud that we can now call them friends.

I do not feel that we had a tainted win, but I also do not feel that our competitors (especially in the semis) were given the chance to make their mark. I'm proud to have been able to compete against such marvelous alliances. I sincerely hope that this never happens to any teams again. There is nothing more painful than spending hundreds of hours painstakingly designing, building and perfecting a robot to have issues beyond one's control. I don't think any team on Einstein feels that the competition was completely fair, but I think FIRST handled the situation as best they could at that very moment in time. I hope that no one spouts ill-will towards any teams that competed on Einstein because the issues encountered seem beyond their control. We all stepped out onto the field, did our best and played our hearts out. It was a day I'll never forget and will cherish forever.

- Bryce

P.S. On a lighter note, we should really just enjoy the moment since the world is going to end in December anyway :).

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To me this is shining example of why you deserve the victory. You offered to help them even if it meant it might cost you.

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I hope FIRST can get to the bottom of this.

As I understand it, the Einstein field itself was a spare field and had never been used in competition before? Even in the best of circumstances I can't see this being a great move. I think we all know that until something has been "battle tested" it hasn't really been proven. I'm hoping this factor doesn't go unnoticed in the ensuing investigation.

Congrats and much respect to the winning teams. You played the "whole" game and won. Inspiring.

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I'm glad to see that FIRST issued a statement about Einstein and they recognized the problems going on and will be looking into it. What happened was unfortunate but it is clear that everyone at FIRST is working their hardest to find out what happened and work to prevent issues like this in the future.

FIRST has given all of us in the FIRST community a program that has changed our lives. Sometimes bad things happen to good programs, but we have to remember that FIRST is a program that was there for us as we grew and has given us some of us the best times of our lives.

It's time to be supportive to FIRST as they work through some of these problems and I'm proud that I've already seen many people in the FIRST community who are posting positive and thoughtful comments on Chief Delphi about this situation.

Congratulations to all the teams who made it to the finals on Einstein and congratulations to Teams 180, 25, and 16 on being the 2012 World Champions!

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

After reading this thread I think it's safe to say that 180, 25, and 16 didn't have a tainted win, but the game they won wasn't the game anyone expected to be playing.

It's funny (or it's depressing, but I choose to laugh rather then cry) that in arguably the most robotically and problematically precise game in the world luck and factors beyond human control can have such a large impact.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Bryce,

Your alliance was awesome. When our guys played you in the Galileo Semifinals, you guys ran over us like "Grant took Vicksburg" I could tell just how effective Bomb Squad was by my rising blood pressure and you guys and 25 just kept ringing up more baskets while 16 kept stealing our ammo and dumping them on your side. I think indivually you were all very tough competitors but your combination of skills and game strategy made you the champion alliance. Congratulations to all.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

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: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

This is a competition. The winner is supposed to be the best at building and driving robots. Maintaining a connection is not the thing that's being tested, it's the prerequisite. Further, can you point to a thing that a team can do to maintain connection better? Because if you can, you should have spoken up to all the teams on Einstein, who were being randomly dropped with no discernable solution. This was not a competition, this was a lottery. I put no faith in the results of the event to speak to who built the best robot.

Every alliance on Einstein made it there because they deserved to be there, and they each had a shot at winning. They were never given that shot. The results to me are as though Einstein never happened- all four alliances are the best alliances in FRC 2012.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

As techhelpbb already pointed out, this is simply awesome.

What can the winning alliances say to anyone who says that they have a "tainted" win? I've already spoke to this Saturday night. All of the competitors did the best they could in the provided conditions. The absolute best thing that can happen from this is that everyone learns from the experience. Even if you're not directly involved with the teams on the field, I think you can take something away from the 2012 season.

I trust that all of the right people are examining the data and will present a solution that will improve us moving forward. As much as possible, let's keep a positive outlook towards the future and look to the past AS needed.

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The (work of) the network stack in VxWorks is accomplished in the "netTask". One can alter the relative priority of this task to application tasks to achieve desired behaviors. The netTask was probably alive as well as the FRMComm task.

The standard behavior of VxWorks to an exception is to suspend the offending task (not the entire system) and print out a message to the console. So what you are saying makes perfect sense!

Our students had many such problems (during development) where the robot seemed to still be connected but some portion of it stopped operating. We separate the control of every major component into a separate task (drive, gather, shoot, autonomous, etc) so any one of the subsystems might fail. It was ALWAYS because of a human programming error. Luckily I teach Wind River courses and knew exactly what to look for.

Many of our problems came from the C/C++ code for capturing and analyzing images. One really had to know what was going on to migrate the NI Vision stuff to C++ (while removing some of the memory allocations that slowed it down) and get it just right. I BELIEVE there are comm problems with the FMS this year but I'll bet a lot of teams issues relate to the camera/analysis code and memory allocation/manipulation errors.

An exemplary example of GP - your alliance was talented, gracious and professional!

The network applications could be buggy but the network stack is pretty bullet-proof. It is derived from the BSD 4.4 stack and pretty well exercised in the real world.

I enjoyed the matches and have no problems lauding 180/16/25 as our 2012 FIRST champions! But to FIRST - please fix the FMS! And please start by rotating out the D-Link router/bridges/radios.

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;)

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

We had one camera connected at the Bayou Regional and never had comm issues. We added a second camera for CMP and connected for our practice match perfectly. We went on for match #1 and couldnt connect. (I must say as an ex-FTA assistant, hearing them say "Bypass 1912" was one of the worst feelings ever). After that match I switched out our radio (all of our radios were reprogrammed for CMP) and went to match #2. We connect for approximately ten second and then it dropped. The FTA said "I have no confidence in your radio" and we were bypassed again. I then received very generous help from some FTAs and control experts (in another thread I explain their extreme kindness) who ended up downgrading my radio firmware version from 1.4 to 1.2 and then we decided to disconnect our two radios. By the odd event of a balsa wood airplane coming on field we were able to replay match #1, but this time with our dual camera system disconnected entirely. From then on I never had issues connecting to the field and never replugged in either camera. The FTAs mentioned that dual camera had caused problems for other teams.

I dont know if the dual camera issue was the problem for anyone else. All i know is, my controls freshmen have a sworn vengeance against camera now..

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

987 ran the entire season (65+/- matches including practice matches) with 2 cameras and a Kinect without any coms dropped until our matches on Einstein...:(

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

1717 went dead in a qualifying match in which 1662 saved their gravy by scoring a zillion baskets.

An interesting question is whether the combination of so many 'bots using so much band width was higher than in a typical regional.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

We were up high in the stands. The loud noise we heard was hail, not high winds or tornado, nor thunder. The situation didn't seem quite that dire. Also, the event at Busch appears to be high winds, not a tornado.

Regardless, probably taking more appropriate actions would have been better.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

We had a similar issue at Davis in which our comms were dropping after a few seconds into the match. It turned out that absolutely nothing was wrong with our radio -- the resolution of our camera feed, when using dual cameras, was simply too high, causing the memory on either the cRIO or driver station computer (I'll get back to you on which one) to overload, which resulted in packet loss and a lost connection.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Along these lines....... The only time in ~30 matches this year we were dead on the field, was NOT because of comms loss. We had errors that continued to accumulate on the DS. Now I am not certain the exact mechanism that caused us to sit dead on the field, but we suspect that we had filled up a buffer, HD space, or.... Whatever it was, as soon as we cleared the error queue, or robot was able to move again.

Once we figured this out, clearing the queue became part of our start up routine for every match.

After this, we also found the root cause of 2 out of the three errors that kept happening and corrected it. That reduced the number of errors being logged.

Whether this is related to what other teams were experiencing or not, I don't know. I put it out there to add to the clues that might help get to the bottom of the "comm errors".

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Can the teams on Einstein post what version of firmware was on their bridge? I know that at the South Florida Regional (our second event - which coincidentally used the same field as our first event, the Orlando Regional), they downgraded everyone to 1.21, so that's what we were using. I'm wondering if anyone was running 1.4?

Also, after talking with some of the tech gurus and some other teams at SFR, it was recommended to us that we log off or reboot the laptop after every match as some of the network data was not being released. Did anyone else do this?

SPAM had a camera on board that only streamed to the DS running SmartDashboard and something like 8-12 pieces of data on the screen. We originally were tracking with a second camera on the cRIO, but the driver was better than our turning algorithm so we scrapped it at the end of the SFR.

- Bryce

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

1114 and 2056 both had 1.21

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I have a lengthy post regarding this topic already, but there's a couple things I still want to say.

The champions are champions now, and will remain so. Might as well make the best out of that situation. Team 4334 heartily congratulates the champions.

However, this was a world championship competition. The people who made the calls they did shifted the immediate blame from the FIRST to the teams in the eyes of the average spectator.

Imagine if at the Stanley Cup finals, there was a massive hole in the ice, that at times, detained half the players on the ice and kept them from moving at all. I sort of think they might stop the gameplay and fix the ice.

While everyone's gracious professionalism remained remarkably high on the floor considering what happened, it doesn't take away from this that it is completely unacceptable. I mean, if you want to break it down, the teams played a little under 20 matches at the championships, at a $5000 entry fee, we all paid $250 to get screwed by the field. I've already said that I'm not going to play the "well this would have happened if Einstein wasn't broken" game, because, well it's really not very gracious, but nonetheless I feel cheated out of an opportunity to show the world what we could do. The Maple Leaf Alliance had an amazing triple balance, and although I am biased because I was part of that alliance, I think we can all agree it was impressive nonetheless.

If you're interested, you can see my full post on what happened on Einstein here.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&postcount=182

Mac

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Lots of us non Canadians don't get hockey references :P

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

We trying to find the root of our error, we looked at our resolution. I believe we had both cameras at the default of 30. Based on the suggestion of an FTA both were scaled down to 5. However, we kept the cameras unplugged and therefore never tested if if was the resolution that gave us problems. I could have, but I didn't want to risk being dead in a match.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Over-all we've had an awesome season and I've documented much of its awesome-ness here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=106240 . However I have many issues with how Einstein was handled, and after giving myself a bit of time to catch my breath I thought I would add my thoughts to the debate:

Let’s start off this way. While I love FIRST and I know that it is an incredible organization, and while I will continue to support it in the future... I believe that they messed up, REALLY bad! Almost every aspect of how Einstein was handled was wrong in my mind and FIRST has some serious fixing to do. We can look at all sorts of impacts, but the one I am most familiar with is what it did to our team. We were the first rookie team to make Einstein since 2009, but the night after that monumental accomplishment there was not a smile to be found. We are starting to get over it, but for the first few days, that screw up overshadowed everything else about the championship in the place it matters most... the hearts of the students.

The mistakes started at the beginning of the season and many people have talked about them already: FIRST really should have stopped considering themselves infallible and implemented proper troubleshooting as soon as the problems surfaced; They also should have had more contingencies to deal with the problem.

Their next step was the one thing I applaud them for. When the first two matches on Einstein went bad, FIRST did the right thing and replayed them (I was really surprised by the amount of cheering when they announced this). However the thing that gets me is that, to the best of our knowledge, nothing was actually done to fix the field between that and the next match. What FIRST actually did to try and fix the problem is something we can only speculate about, because there was, and still is, very little transparency about what happened.

Once it was readily apparent that the next set of matched had gone no better, FIRST decided that they would power through anyways and crown a champion regardless of the fact that all of the matches were more heavily influenced by the field than any other single factor. At this point FIRST should have called it. Our entire alliance was standing there incredulous when they announced that the scores from SF2-1 would stand. I believe that if they cannot provide a field that is fair for all of the teams and lives up to the specs they provided, then FIRST should have stopped playing matches until they could, in this case that would have meant crowning all 4 alliances world champions. It’s rather bold of me to suggest that we should have been given that honor, and I think our team already had so much good luck going for us that we really have nothing to complain about. However it is absolutely ridiculous for FIRST to suggest that our two incredible alliance partners, 1114/2056, deserved to lose those matches in the way they did. Since there is no validity to the matches that went down on Einstein I really wonder why FIRST insisted on holding them at all.

Regardless I would like to extend my congratulations to 25, 16, 180, 233, 987, 207, 118, 548 and 2194 who all built incredible machines and worked extremely hard to get to Einstein. Despite my opinion, given what actually happened, I recognize that there is no way to go back and make everyone world champions, as much as I wish there was.

Throughout it was surprising and insulting that FIRST kept pretending there wasn’t a problem. Our driver already addressed this in another post so I won’t harp on it http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...&postcount=182

I may also be in the minority of people who are not content with FIRST’s apology. In my mind given such a monumental failure I would expect something more than a statement which basically boils down to “sorry for the inconvenience”. Maybe:
Followed by opening a website to detail the results of their investigation into the field failure, which was immediately populated with the error logs from the Einstein field along with full information about the inner workings of the field electronics. In addition there would have to be pre-set deadlines for further reporting. To deal with the damage that has already been done, I'm a big fan of giving all the Einstein teams qualification and free registration, but I’m rather too biased for that to hold much weight. Something to remember though, is that collectively the 12 of us paid $60,000 dollars to attend the event (nevernmind the registration of everyone watching) and got a completely ganked product. If this was the real world, FIRST would be giving a full refund and doing some serious damage control (remember Toyota?).

FIRST has a massive black eye and the only way to move past it is admitting it and making serious changes. Something they haven’t done so far, but which I still hope will happen soon.

That’s a lot of text, but it's all part of a season which was awesome for us personally! But in which, the organization itself screwed up bad. I’m still fully behind their mission, and if they get their act together, as I have faith such an intelligent group of individuals will, then I forgive everything and fully support their organization as well.

Here’s to an even better 2013!

- Alex

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

We were using a new bridge, rev. B1, with 2.0 firmware. We never died throughout the entire event. JT and I wired a bridge backward and burned it up, so we ordered the new one. Maybe it was a fortunate mistake...

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Thank you Alex, you found the word I've been looking to describe my reaction to all of this.

Incredulous. What a great word, and how descriptive it is of this situation and my reaction to it.

You know the stereotypical teen reaction to a tough breakup? That's pretty much how I've handled this (minus the crying and threats).

Anyways, everyone already knows my opinions so I'll stop getting in on posts.

Mac

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

These comm issues could have almost been predicted. In the early matches on Curie we got so far behind Thursday because of issues and they finally got it working smoothly. Trying to run only a few matches on Einstein without working out any issues by having practice matches on the field seems to be asking for problems. Another solution would of been to leave the Curie or Gallaleo field assembled until the end of the competition incase these comm issues occured they could have moved to a field that was not having the same problems earlier in the day and see if that would have solved the problems. Those fields were 90% apart by the end of the Championship when they could of been used as a back up once a problem was seen. A lot of possible issues could of been the problem, including the storm outside, but having another field as a back up might have been at least worth a try.

Something else to consider. With the large number of people and cell phones in the stands during the championships was there interference. I am sure many people had mobile hot spots running in the stands and others at least were using data. Could all of these signals caused a problem with the field?

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

We also bought a new one becasue of issues we ran into in florda.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Interesting that you guys had the RevB bridge...at some of the MAR events IIRC they strongly recommended that teams NOT use that one, and I believe at Rutgers a team wasn't even allowed to use the RevB bridge.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I was not at the event but I was in contact with several friends and family there and monitored the weather when I did find out what was happening. Quickly moving from the floor to safety is relatively easy because there is plenty of room and not a lot of people. The stands is a completely different scenario because there is tons of people and limited space/walking area. Leaving a crowded stadium at the end of a game is extremely crowded and chaotic add to that chaos, panic, and disorder and you have yourselves a death trap for smaller people. Looking back to events like hurricane Katrina the main shelter was the dome in a catagory 5 storm.

The best thing to do was let people know of the serious weather outside/keep people indoors which they did and not create undue panic/hysteria. Yes there are events where we ask, "Why wasn't a warning given/more action taken?" and other times wonder why chaos was created over nothing and someone got hurt. I'm not advocating that the weather wasn't serious, but it wasn't serious enough to evacuate the building and create a panic.

I'm sure FIRST has an evacuation plan considering tornadoes tragically ripped through St. Louis the week before the Championship last year. Some might say they felt in serious danger from where they were on the floor, others in the nose bleeds say they thought the hail sounded cool and felt not danger.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

While the events that took place on Einstein a very unfortunate it will not tarnish my view of FIRST and what the organization stands for. I plan to work as hard as I can next year to spread the message of FIRST and bring a regional to Calgary along with hopefully up to 30 new FRC teams in the southern Alberta area. As well as continuing with 4334 to have a successful second year and return to Worlds in St. Louis next year. The "Eh Team" shall unite again!

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, but FIRST was in contact with the NWS in St. Louis. It's probably about the most responsible thing they could have done in this type of situation -- going to the people who know about the storm.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I basically agree with your post, and I am satisfied with First's handling of the situation.

I just want to point out that hurricanes and tornadoes are very different beasts.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

As many of you know, the real reason for 1717 going dead was deliberate wifi jamming by a rogue mentor. This was the same person who disrupted the Einstein matches.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

Is there any proof of this? If I remember correctly from FIRST's statement and team 548's statement that this was never said. Also, REALLY old thread revival.

Re: FIRST's statement on Einstein
 

I was correcting my earlier statement for the record that there was a problem with the bandwidth--that turned out not to be true, so my observation was incorrect.

What FIRST or Team 548 said officially doesn't mean that they covered all of the issues. I've discussed this directly with an individual who has direct knowledge and stated that the disruption began with 1717 and then moved on to Einstein.