Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

I was in the theatre with no wristband ... it was mostly empty. Anyway, I loved the regional - not too many people, not too few. It felt like any other regional to me!

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

The unsplit archive for the full-field feed for eliminations can be found here:
http://www.justin.tv/watchfirstnow2/b/507688418

The elims start around 1:54:00.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

Thanks goes to the many volunteers that worked long hours to make this event happen. Without Crescent and their work GTRWest would not have happened. We needed a week one event in Canada. Hershey Center was not available. They looked all summer to find a venue but nothing available. crescent was approached and agreed. It disrupted the school but they were very garacious about it. Parking was also an issue as there was not much onsite parking. Walking from other schools around and a shuttle on Friday.

What many do not realize is that Crescent is not a large school. They are Grade 3 (I believe) to Grade 12. Their upper school (high school) is about 300 students. I have been to events held in U.S. high schools that are huge. In Canada our HS are much much smaller and don't have the same facilities as the U.S. HS's that hold FIRST events.

Again I would like to thank the planning committee for their hard work and commitment in making this such a great event.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

Crescent certainly did a good job hosting the event with the resources they had. There were a couple of minor issues, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first FIRST event in a new venue. It was *almost* as good as we could have hoped for. IMO, Cory is right, FIRST HQ dropped the ball by not making it well known that the venue was going to be controlled access.

The only big thing that I found irritating at the event was the field failures, and the issue of the field not posting results to the web (so tools like FRC Spyder, and even just looking at the rankings) were made difficult. I don't know if this was related to the field problems or not. An FTA told me it was because the field had no internet connection, which seemed odd, given that two 720p streams were being pushed from the same table with seemingly little in the way of connectivity issues. I don't believe the field issues were in any way related to Crescent's running of the event though.

The field seemed to have an issue at the end of qualifications with the ref tablets and pedestals not lighting. One tablet was replaced, and a match fog horned and replayed twice because of these issues.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

First week event and field issues what do you expect. As for not posting results it was because the internet was not on the FMS. I was there till 1 am Friday morning (18 hours at venue) back at 6:30 am and worked with FIRSTto try and resolve the issue. I was one of 6 or 7 that was working on internet and field issues.

Instead of everyone complaining about this minor issue or that inconvenience maybe the GP thing to do is herald a great event in which teams worked together, rebuilt robots and had had a great time. I have been to other week one events that were not even close to the quality of GTR West.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

With all due respect, Steve, I believe that a significant part of professionalism is acknowledging where we fell short and encouraging constructive discussion about how we can do better in the future.

Sitting around singing kumbaya never got problems fixed.

As part of FIRST competitions in Canada for the last 12 years, I'm well aware, and appreciative of your contributions. I know you are something of an expert when it comes to field internet connectivity issues, and had assumed you were helping with them.

However, when the field is so broken that matches couldn't be run and the standings couldnt be viewed even in the pits by teams, two matches before alliance selections when pick list strategy is heavily dependent on knowing what the standings are, that's kind of a big deal.

I too have attended other Week 1 events that were far more problem riddled. As I acknowledged in my last post, generally speaking, I believe the Crescent event did a good job making the best of a crappy situation.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

Finals at 4:01:00 / 4:21:00 / 4:35:00

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

To be fair, this was not an issue with field, rather a power connection that came loose. I can personally attest that multiple FTAs and volunteers restored power as quickly as humanly possible, without singing a single verse of Kumbaya.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

I haven't met a single person associated with planning or running the event that didn't express some variation of "It's a shame we can't let more people in" before during and after the event.

Sitting around idly never fixed a problem either. Throughout the weekend I didn't meet a single volunteer identifying as a member of your affiliated teams. I did meet many volunteers from many teams in attendance and 2056 even got their sponsor to CNC some bumper measuring tools. Plenty of teams found ways to make the event run smoother. You have been critical of this event and it's volunteers since before it began, and it has not been constructive yet.

P.S. Talk to the DJ at your next event. He wants his club to fundraise for your team because you are from his town.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

The Kumbaya comment was out of frustration at Steve's implication that my negative feedback isn't welcome. Positive feedback is nice, and makes everybody feel good, but accomplishes little else, except to help keep around the changes that we like. Negative feedback is what drives change and helps make the events be the best that they can be, provided its not baseless slamming for no reason.

I agree completely that the field staff (FTAs and others) were working quickly to restore the field to operational status. Things happen, I get it. I agree that the volunteers at the Canadian events are some of the best in the world, and commend each of them for their efforts in making GTRWest 2014 a success, which it was.

I'm sure you can understand how to a casual observer, this incident was easily chalked up to "Oh, look, the field is broken, again".

I don't understand why 5 years into this particular flavour of the control system we still have such consistent problems with it. In addition, we've been hearing lots on CD about the ref tablets being fickle beasts, and the hot goal switching being inexplicably wonky (theres a video online of a match where one side stays hot for 9 seconds and the other side only goes hot for about 1 second before auto is over). Thankfully, I didn't notice the hot goals being weird at GTRW.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

First of all I want to thank everyone for their hard work in making things as amazing as possible. It was a week 1 event and we had our issues.

I want to thank every single team for working with us when we were fixing things. No team had an issue with any of the delays and were only eager to do anything we needed them to do in order to continue playing matches.

At GTR-W the pedestals were not really a big issue, yes there was a match or two on the Saturday where they were being funky. But the FTA's so dedicated to getting the field to work stayed late on Saturday night just to get the field components working as intended. On the Sunday there were 0 issues with the pedestals and we also had volunteers in place to make sure any issue was dealt with quickly. They didn't have anything to report. Ref Tablets were not being fickle, there was a power outage on the field as mentioned earlier that's one of those "wow that can happen" things that rarely ever does happen. Was fixed in minutes.

Standings didn't work. Yes that is unfortunate. I agree that kumbaya wont get problems fixed. I know that competing teams need certain things and it sucks that they don't have them. Believe you me, the FTA's knew the problems and had plans in place to fix them. The reason why they did not make any move to fix internet was because they didnt want to risk losing the field once again, because if you noticed the rankings not being updated then I am sure you noticed the field was working much better by that point.

I couldnt find another thread for this. Congratulations to various teams on their success.
4914 - rookie all star
1310, 610, 5076 - Regional Winners
1241 - VoY(2), Deans List(2), Chairmans(I know how deserving you guys are of this award)
Congratulations to all of the other teams as well for competing at a week 1 event, its not easy by any means.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

When will the archive be posted?

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

Hopefully I will have the elims up later tonight, Qualification matches tomorrow night.

-Bochek

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

Thanks for all your hard work.

Re: Week 1 Event Notice - FIRST Robotics Canada
 

Elims are up now. No qualification matches till tomorrow.