Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

The picture I saw included at least one road case that was aprox as tall as the tool road cases. I'm also not sure if the width is the same as our traditional FRC road cases though I would suspect so. One thing I know that is significantly different is that side boarders have the polycarb pop riveted to it and I believe that is what fits into a single tall case. So that takes the sides from 3 short cases to one tall case. I'm not sure how the handle the driver's stations that now takes up two tall cases and two short ones. I'm guessing each end would have their own case and I would imagine they would also be tall cases.

I for one am very bummed about the timing of this as Washington FIRST Robotics spent a big chunk of money purchasing fields from FIRST's fabricator and then spent a lot of money on parts and a lot of time to build road cases for the two fields that we own.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Looking at FIRST's basic field drawings for this year, it looks like all it includes is the side panels, and the supports for the driver station. Since the driver stations themselves have been different for the past 4 years, maybe those would be included with the FIRST provided parts, and the AM field would just be the sides and the uprights for the driver stations however large they are. That seems like it would fit in 3 cases without too much trouble, and is believable.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

The "standard" official FRC field perimeter includes everything for a 27' x 54' field, except the poly carb that goes over the outside sections of the driver's station. The center 3 sections of the driver's station have remained the same for a number of years, it is just the panels in the outside sections that are different or are deleted. I've got a pallet in storage at the Washington FIRST Robotics Fieldhouse with those items that were not used in this years field configuration. That includes 4 diamond plate panels and 4 of the top cross members per field.

The AM field would replicate the connection system used on the driver's station so that you could substitute a different lower panel in the outside sections of the driver's station as was done this season, where the low goal was. It would also need the ability place the corner uprights on either side of the 3 center sections where the drivers actually stand as was done last season, to attach the angled feeder station and low goal.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

CA is more like 14 hours end to end, but I don't know how many, if any teams are on the Oregon border.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Inside California, 0. The furthest north team in the state is in Oroville (4643).

In Oregon, there's a cluster around Medford of 4 teams.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I know at one point that was a rule, but it is no longer. In Mid-Atlantic, for example, both Katie and Kelsey Stevens (MC & GA respectively) are college students. Zach Orr in Michigan. James Spencer, out in Canada, is a graduate student. I'm sure you can find other examples all over the world, but those are just the few I have in my head right now.

No person under 13 years of age may volunteer (at all.) I believe if you're under 16 you're generally assigned with your parent in a role where both people can work together.

As a volunteer coordinator, I make sure to put minors and younger students in 'flexible' roles (field reset, safety glass, pit admin support, etc) since these are not event-critical and can be swapped in for other people.

For bigger roles (MC/GA/Ref/Inspector), it's greatly advised that these people be adults, and beyond that I go by maturity level. If you're 19 and can handle yourself in the role, then you've got it. If you're 45 and can't treat a student with respect - sorry, you're out. It's not about your status as a student, but about how you can handle the role.

In the words of Jess: VC'd!

This is a big challenge in MAR (the only district I have experience with, so that's where I'm speaking from). The nice thing is, MAR has 8 (9?) offseasons now where people interested in new volunteer roles they may not have tried out before can get involved. I know at MidKnight Mayhem, we're training new FTAAs, Field Supervisors, Scorekeepers, and Refs. Can't speak for any other events, but our hope is to get people with experience in those roles so that by the time the season comes around they'll be another person to throw into those rotations.

My advice to new districts: Don't lose the energy, the flash or the 'show' of a big regional. The quote from Zondag's paper clearly rings true in MI, just from seeing their events on a webcast. In my head, I think it's really important to put effort forth to maintain that atmosphere, because if there's not an active move towards maintaining the excitement (and don't forget, the FIRST branding!), the district events just end up looking like off-seasons. And why would I pay $2500 + travel for an offseason?

Other advice: Make sure your events are evenly spread out. In MAR, the team I work with is set pretty closely to the population center of teams, and yet we have to drive an hour or more to any of our district events (2+ hours for DCMP). I can't speak for our neighboring teams, but this is a pretty stressful thing on our budget. In fact, since going to districts 1923 has spent about as much money on hotels/buses/other transport in one season than we did from 2006-2010. Part of that is from team growth (30 > 100+ students), and part of that is because we need a bus and a hotel for each of our events now rather than -maybe- once per year. It's tough on us.

Oops. I'd intended for this to be a quick post. Turned into a brain dump. Sorry all! :)

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

FWIW team358.org has that data for >90% of the FRC teams by mapping the school or organization associated w/ the team number

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Which actually doesn't work all that well. That data is significantly harder to place on a map than an address. The far simpler approach is merely to indicate that there are multiple teams sharing that team. An approach Google Maps does not allow me to use easily. I've created a map using leaflet.js, OpenStreetMap and D3. Data was geocoded via the datasciencetoolkit api using R. It was then exported as a CSV.

I'm posting this with the caveat that non continental US data is flat out wrong. It's probably useful for this discussion for most of you, I apologize to folks who it got wrong. I'm in the process of re geocoding the data in the next few days (I may have stuff I need to take care of tonight so I might not get to it) using Texas A&M's Geo Services. If that continues to be problematic I'll just find the teams that are being problems and do them manually (I'm not looking forward to this).


EDIT AGAIN: Thanks to Nate Laverdue who found my missing Canadians... and a few other teams. Any teams with St (as in Saint) in their location are located in Germany. Don't ask me why.

With my disclaimers out of the way: http://bl.ocks.org/schreiaj/raw/2374ea9049e00a134f24/



Edit: And just so we're clear, Mark's work is awesome. Thank you to him and Team 358 for all their archival work. I'd have a much harder time doing stuff like this without their data resources.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I believe that the team that had to travel the farthest within Oregon for DCMP was 4057 (KB Bots) from Klamath Falls, roughly a 5 hour drive.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

In general, I like your procedures. However, I would argue that especially this year, field reset was 'Event Critical'. Several young kids in this role scared me. To be fair, it wasn't just young kids either :p

It certainly improved over the season, but a lot of people weren't familiar with the rules. Often field-reset wouldn't know who to hand the ball to, what to do in the event of a full-field score, or a ball being scored in the wrong goal, etc. If field-reset continues to have such a large impact on game-play, I might suggest we expand age restrictions to 16+ in that role too.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Maybe you can't, but I'm sure we'd all agree :rolleyes:

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Why do you have hotel rooms for events that a 1 hour away? 1712 hasn't stayed in a hotel once since MAR went to districts. Granted, Hatboro and Chestnut Hill are both an easy commute for us, but we've also attended events in Lenape (1 hr) and Bethlehem (70min) without booking hotels. Those are equivalent commute as WWPW to Mt Olive or Lenape. We use school buses to commute to events, so we haven't spent a penny of team funds on travelling since MAR districts began.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Yeah, this is one of the reason districts are supposed to help cut down on costs...

A lot of teams just car-pool or drive to close districts individually. Cutting costs on travel and lodging is a must.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

For this year, ABSOLUTELY. I'm just speaking generally. :)

School requirement, as I understand from our teacher/advisor. Both because of our group size and the distance from the school. X chaperones on the trip for Y number of students, and so on. We also have to bump-up to the 'nice' (read: expensive) buses instead of yellow school buses once you're over 45min away. Believe me, if we didn't have to, we wouldn't. But it's still kind of frustrating that we would have to ask our team parents to drive over an hour for every single event when we used to drive ~15 min for the regional. We're just the unlucky ones on the map, I suppose.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Regardless, MAR has a thing for holding events in the middle of nowhere and it really impacts teams with a 'lesser budget'.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Since no new confirmed district events have been recently posted; may be it is time to start listing confirmed events, which may help identify possible areas for new potential districts.

Confirmed 2015 FRC Events:

Week 1 / 26-28 Feb 2015 - Palmetto - Myrtle Beach Convention Center

Week 4 / 19-21 Mar 2015 - Virginia - VCU Siegel Center
NOTE: This confirmation means 1) the National Capital Region (VA, DC & MD) will continue to operate under the old regional format (no surprise there) and 2) both the Greater DC Regional & Chesapeake Regional will also function next season.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Yes to the first, but not necessarily to the second. Just because the Virignia Regional is confirmed does not necessarily mean that the Greater DC and Cheseapeake Regional are also 100% confirmed. Just look at what's happening in Nevada, it seems to be likely that the Las Vegas Regional will not be returning due to monetary issues.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I think he means more that Chesapeake and DC will not be operating as districts since VA is not operating as a district.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Two things i know and recall....

One....I've heard that when the National Capitol district is set up that
because of Virginia First's long ties to VCU that supposedly the Seigel
Center will be the site of the district Championship. Also...if you look
at the schedule for the Seigel Center for next year they already list the
dates for the Virginia regional as being confirmed. The dates given indicate
days needed for a regional since a regional takes a day longer to set up
and hold compared to a district event.

Two....When we attended the Chesapeake regional this year it was
mentioned that the Chesapeake regional would be held at the Comcast
Center for the next three years (not sure if it included this year) I think
this was worked out thru the Dean of U of M's Engineering school.
So the Comcast center will be used for either a district or regional
for a couple more years.

On another note....the move of both the DC and Chesapeake regionals
may indicate a early move to district type venues...but thats just
speculation on my part.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Anyone who went to the Patriot Center this year probably can figure it would be a far bettwer district venue than regional venue. With 10 fewer pit stalls the aisles might be wider than 6 feet and you might even be able to see the field because they can push it back further and expand seating.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

The GIS Major in me is drooling, but quivering at the same time. I've been wanting to utilize Arc to do something like this, but it's hard to keep up with this kind of data.

However, on a different note, all of this talk about travel time, district events near them, volunteer base, etc. has got me thinking.

All I want is an event of any kind in West Virginia! Our closest regional is 2 hours away, and the next closest is at least 4-6. We traveled six hours for Knoxville and 10 hours for Palmetto this year. Our off-season event in August is the first FRC event to EVER be held in WV, and we don't have the volunteer base that others do. I guess the moral of my story is be thankful for what you have, everybody. :)

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I think thats just speculation. I thought the real reason was how large the costs were for the two regionals were both being in major expensive convention centers. I remember hearing that the old DC Regional was one of (if not the) most expensive regionals to put on. Shame, both locations were exponentially better than the two locations used this year. (Honestly, anything would be better than the Greater DC regional this year)


Thats a shame. The largest portion of FRC teams in the DMV is around the DC-Baltimore corridor. Combined with it being the nations capital, a district championship anywhere not close to DC would be a major mistake.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

While attending both the NC Regional and VA Regional, I heard talk that once the National Capital Region (VA, DC, & MD) had converted over to the District Model that NC might be included in an expanded NCR.

If that happens then the center of mass for FRC teams within that new NCR would move farther south from the DC-Baltimore corridor towards Richmond.

Also the cost of venues to handle a 64+ team championship event within the Baltimore-DC area is extreme. One of the reasons why regional venues were downsized from both the Washington & Baltimore Convention Centers. And as stated previously in this thread the Patriot & Comcast Centers were hard pressed to handle 50+ teams (both would do well as 40-45 team district events).

Plus the cost of lodging in the whole Baltimore-DC-NOVA area is extreme as well. So most teams from outside that area would be traveling far twice a day to stay in lower cost alternatives. Also, being the Baltimore-DC-NOVA area during a District/Region Championship is not a critical issue, since there will be very little, if any, free time for tourist activities in most team's trip schedules.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

What do you need as far as data? What format would you like it as?

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Check out the "Indiana going to Districts for 2015" thread - Great news!!
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=129784

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I have heard very recently that Virginia - Maryland - DC will move to district in 2016 And North Carolina will NOT combine into that district.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I had heard that NC was looking to try and move into the District mode. If a possible combination of VA, MD, DC & NC is not in the cards (as stated previously); and discussions for either a NC-SC or a NC-TN combination have fallen by the wayside. May be NC can pull-off an 'Indiana' and go solo into the world of district events.

NOTE: Loved playing down in the NC Regional last season, especially during eliminations teamed up with FRC 2640 & FRC 4828. May be it was wishfully thinking on my part that a VA-MD-DC-NC region was possible, combining a lot of great teams and folks together. It is also my understanding that the NCR (VA-MD-DC) will go District in 2016.

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

Well, it seems Indiana is confirmed as a district!

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

I personally would love to combine with SC for a "Carolinas" district...but the rumors I've heard is there is resistance to that idea from our southern half (just rumors I've heard...nothing concrete). As for Tennessee - North Carolina, that creates a district that is larger west to east than the distance (south to north) from NC to Maine. Just not geographically feasible.

Yes...it was fun. We enjoyed adding the "Bake" to your "Shake"!

Re: Confirmed New Districts for 2015?
 

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...draising-bulbs

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