Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

Probably will. Can't say for sure yet, school administration and scheduling a lot of other stuff has to happen first. But the Original RITR was so much fun that I can't imagine not going :). Seriously though. 5 of the 6 finalists and a ton of playoff teams from Virginia this year will probably be there. Now all we have to do is convince 4481 :)

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

Hi guys,

Casper Here from 4481. I just wanted to say that it delights me to read your opinions about the Virginia Regional. In my opinion it was just great, i had so much fun. Afterwards reading your posts and seeing howmuch our team was appreciated really brightens my day (and the entire year :D ).

I also want to say how awesome it was to play with you guys. I think each and every team in the regional was great! Though i still want to point out how great is was to work with Blue Cheese 1086 and Talon 540. The finals were really exciting! sparky384, TripleHelix 2363 and B.O.T 1610 played great and you guys totally deserve the Banners! Nonetheless it excites me knowing that Blue Cheese and Talon are still going to St Louis as well, and you guys totally earned it as well.

I also want to thank A.R.T. 5546. you guys did great and definetly earned the rookie all star. Though handing over your Team Shirt to me as a token of appreciation really got to me. thanks again many times, it really means a lot to me getting such a gift.

I really look forward to next couple weeks, when we'll hopefully meet again @ st Louis.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

If we aren't all in the same division, we should at least try to put our alliance back together for one practice match if the opportunity presents itself :).

Don't worry though; I'll be stopping by to get one of those sweet hats :D

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

I really hope to see you guys next year, if possible! You guys made a beautiful robot, and a few of us from 2028 had a wonderful time spending nearly 45 minutes talking to one of your mentors about your arm system, learning about carbon fiber and some of your design ideas. Good luck at Championships! And congratulations on the Engineering Inspiration Award, you guys definitely deserved it. You guys are an amazing group of talented and dedicated engineers.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

So Rumble in the Roads is definitely happening this year? Some of us were talking about it earlier today, and were curious as it has not been officially announced.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

Oh it's happening, we didn't announce it until May last year. But, I would be looking out for an announcement very soon. Hint hint.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

Awesome, good to hear. We plan on making some improvements to our bot before we show up, and hope to improve ourselves even better over Virginia.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

I was just reading a thread about determining the cause of robots dropping communications during a match.

Does any one know the root cause of 540's communication issues in the Finals?

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

I believe what I heard from one of the 540 students was their battery voltage was draining very quickly at times and was dropping below the needed level.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

I don't have a root cause, but I watched the radio reboot on two different occasions, and other times watched an apparent roborio reboot, where we could see the radio via the driver station, and then No Robot Code, then Teleop Enabled.


Wetzel

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

I am the button man for 540, but I am not a programmer. However, I have spoken to my driver (who is also the programming lead for 540) and battery voltage is definitely one of the issues. I do not know if this would have caused the bridge to reboot, but based on the length of the times we disconnected during F1 (Two stints of ~30 seconds), it would not surprise me.

The FTA said that during SF2, our roboRio rebooted; however, we were unable to determine the problem. It seemed to fix itself after we cleared some wires away from the reset button. However, I can confirm that that was NOT due to battery voltage after checking the logs.

Although we are pretty sure it was the battery voltage, we are unsure of what was drawing power. We will be doing testing as soon as we get our practice bot back to working order. If anyone has any suspicions or suggestions, we definitely want to explore all options and any ideas would be appreciated.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

If the battery was draining quickly and dropping the voltage low I would suspect a short somewhere.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

We got kinda screwed in quarterfinals by "connection" issues too. I don't know if you saw 2028, 1522, and 339's first QF match, but our bot (2028) would not register any controls. The field has records of us being connected 100% of the match, our driver station was getting inputs from our controls, but the robot wouldn't react at all. We got back to pit after the match, and it worked like a charm. After 20 minutes, FTA still could not find out what happened. So, it defaulted to being our fault. Naturally. The only match we had "communication issues" out of the 20 we've played this year. We still have no clue what happened to our bot that match. I know this doesn't relate to 540, but figured I would drop in on the comm conversation. (Also, forgive the not so technical explanation. I don't understand all the programming stuff.)

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

After the finals were over, one of the field guys found us in the stands and asked if we had any connection issues during eliminations. It seemed like a very odd question at the time (especially after it was all over), but I'm guessing they were trying to figure out what happened.

Our team had no discernible outages or comms losses at all during VA. In practice matches our controller / DS gave out due to faulty USB connectors. Pre-competition, our practice bot would sometimes turn on and off while sitting idle, but we never saw this on our competition bot. We assume that was the PDP fuse issue, but haven't proven that. Positive it was not brown out, as we frequently ran our practice bot and battery to brown out level and that has fairly distinct symptoms.

Re: 2015 Virginia Regional
 

Like I said, between Myrtle Beach Regional 3 weeks before and and the Virginia Regional matches before, we had not had a single issue. We were just at a loss as to what happened. Our programmer re-deployed code in queue, so maybe that caused an issue? But our programming mentor can't see why that would have been a problem.