SBPLI Regional Discussion
 

Congratulations to all the teams that won awards today! Just wanted to open this thread for discussion about the regional. Hope you had am awesome time.

Team 2053

Re: SBPLI Regional Discussion
 

Congratulations to our partners from the Iowa regional, 1156, for their regional victory. You guys were a pleasure to work with at Iowa, and I hope we get the chance to see you again at championships.

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My thoughts on the regional:

- this was our first time here and we honestly didn't like it as much as Pittsburgh. Probably because of our lackluster performance. We had a lot of issues that were not preventable in any way. At the end of the first day, we looked pretty good and if we pulled of three wins, we would be in a nice position to be picked. However, our second day, one match we had the driver station computer crash on us. We had to reboot and obviously we were dead in the water the whole game. After that, our last match, a certain team decided to ram us in the neutral zone with something outside their frame perimeter. They got stuck to us and they hit our power button causing us to be dead again for the whole match. They got a yellow card for it, but the damage was already done. We knew teams would see that we didn't move for the last two matches and we were of their pick list. This also caused us to fall in ranking points.

Also, as this is my last year on the drive team and the team, so being disabled for my whole last match, EVER was heartbreaking.

I also would like to note the issue with the field. The lights changed from Thursday to Friday, so all of our vision values were off. We had lots of trouble finding values, especially with no calibration time.

Overall, Tigertronics had a good time at the event, it could have been better for us.

Again, congratulations to all the teams that won and hope you have a great time at worlds.

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Did you ask anyone if you could calibrate it this morning? I am sure if you asked they would have let you.

All in all, I was very surprised with how things turned out for you guys specifically. Personally if I was an alliance captain you would have been on my list.

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We asked a few times at the beginning and end of the days and were informed that such a request would not be possible. Although they agreed they significantly changed the lighting a few times.

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Now my thoughts

Just so everyone knows I did not compete in this event but, was there all 3 days the entire time live streaming it.

To start I was very impressed with the turnaround times compared to NYC despite there only being 15 minutes for lunch on Friday. Elims especially went very quick. Waterloo started at the same time but, SBPLI was giving away awards before 2056 lost their streak.

I was also very impressed with how they treated me as the streamer. I was given as 1080i 60FPS feed of the field along with 100MBS internet. In the end I was able to stream it in native resolution at 60FPS without any studders (Except for the stream crashing during QF-1 although that was my fault as I tried installing an OBS video plugin and was going to play all the reveal videos the teams pre-match which ended up breaking OBS).

Overall I think it was a well run event. Still probably not enough to make it our home regional next year but, Ill gladly run the livestream again.

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Will the streams be archived anwhere? I checked ustream and clicked on videos, but it didn't seem to do anything. Ill checm on my desktop when I get home.

I hate to say this but...

Qualifications will not be archived.

I planned on it but did not realize that the free version of ustream does not allow archiving. I had to use ustream due to some restrictions given to me through SBPLI and would have used YouTube personally. I had a paid ustream account given to me by a friend but was logged into the wrong one and could not change it on TBA.

I tried saving them all locally once I realized this morning that but ran out of space and had to delete all of it so I had space for elims.

Eliminations are all locally saved and will be uploaded tomorrow. But, I know that doesn't help you.

Sorry.

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Alright, we recorded some of our matches on a go pro on the bot. Hopefully a team has some footage as well.

Thank you for the awesome and high quality stream

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It appears we had issues tracking on Day 2. We thought it may have been the carpet bunching, tipping the robot up in front of defense positions 3 and 4. In positions 2 and 5, we found the lighting on Saturday caused our tracking to take a tad longer, then switch between goals ever so slightly. We had absolutely no issues on Friday.

Sans target tracking hiccups on Saturday, and well, of course, tipping over in QF2, I couldn't be prouder of that robot's performance.

Congrats to all!!!

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In the future, you can pm me/Eugene or email contact@tba and we can change webcasts on TBA for you. You can also suggest the other stream link, then both will appear.

Sorry to hear about the mix-up :(

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Yeah, definitely. If I remember correctly, on Saturday, by the time of the last quals, even with a field fault happening, we were still ahead of schedule by a few minutes.

I really enjoyed the atmosphere of SBPLI. Everyone involved made the event very fun. For some odd reason, some of our scouts and I noticed that we were feeling much less exhausted than during our first regional, despite similar sleeping schedules. Actually, we may have ended up with even less sleep on a couple of those days. I personally learned a lot to develop scouting even more in the future, as well. I've gotta give props to the musical performances that happened during the event, too. They all performed swimmingly!

Thank you to all of the volunteers and organizers who made this event what it was, and congratulations to all of the teams! This game was a very interesting one to design and build for, and I was very proud of all of the work teams put into their bots! To those of y'all going to champs, I wish y'all luck! I hope you find a great and similar success. :D

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Here's a video clip of Don Qixote singing "The Impossible Dream"
https://youtu.be/KBzVAOxUs_8

Just curious where did you find this clip? It looks like it's from the stream but, I don't have a backup of it and neither does ustream. Was SBPLI saving all of it?

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At the long Island SBPLI regional there were poor robot playing conditions, the field had bundles of wires running beneath it and the one side had large wrinkles. After alliance selection, teams who were not selected were not allowed to go out the garage door up the ramp, which is the only way to bring out large items such as tool carts. We spoke to the venue instructor and she said it is a FIRST rule that you may not leave until after closing ceremony. I do not believe this is to be true but I could be wrong. There were the storage boxes for the field near the door which people could have maneuvered around easily. They had asked us if we could get our stuff out through there, but then said it was a liability that something may get damaged, they then said we could take all the stuff up the elevator to the loading dock. This dock was about 4 feet elevated with only stairs no ramp so the only way teams could get their stuff out before closing ceremony was to pick them up and put them down over the ledge or carry them down the stairs. This became a problem with these large heavy boxes of parts and tools. To get these down people had to empty everything out and put it all back. This is unacceptable. One of the teams had a 600lbs cart that they had to empty but even after that still weighed about 200lbs so they had to tip it near the edge and tip it over and let it down. This should be the liability they could have gotten seriously hurt.

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Do you know which side of the field? If it was the blue courtyard it might explain this for us!

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2 minutes ahead to be exact. At least according to the FMS....... :)

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Sam

Thanks for running the livestream. It was excellent! We do hope to see the Regal Eagles at SBPLI again soon.

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I believe cables were run under the neutral zone (if memory is correct - there was a lump running the width of the field you could feel as you walked across.

I also saw a field carpet repair occurring where they were taping the carpet back down, I think that was on the red courtyard side (left side looking at the field).

I didn't see this occur, but my team noticed someone (robot) pulled up the carpet about a foot off the floor.

Re: SBPLI Regional Discussion
 

No cables ran under the field.
The lump was caused by the venue's own protective carpet underneath the FIRST playing carpet. This is to prevent damage to the basketball court as robot tires burn through the FIRST carpet and robots smash onto the field surface.
Unfortunately, the venue requires their protective carpet to overlap at the periodic joints which sometimes produces a small ridge straight across the field.

P.S.
Sam, that was an 8G clip Solomon preserved as a special request, so no other footage.

PPS
I'll make inquires of Solomon in case other footage happens to have been preserved.

Re: SBPLI Regional Discussion
 

With the livestream not archived - does anyone know of anyone with the match videos from their own or team recordings? We'd be happy to help copy, upload to youtube, and document match numbers / team numbers / etc.

Congratulations to 1156 - Under Control for the win with 287 and 263! We played with them in Virginia last year and were happy to see them win this year. They have a great drive team and are great to work with.

Our (my) personal favorite match (maybe ever as coach the last few years) was against 1156 in this regional. We knew it would be tough, we weren't predicted to win - and one of our alliance robots only had one drive motor working on one side of their tank. We re-strategized our approach in a scramble before the match and in the final 30 seconds realized we were only behind by 7 points. We had rebuilt our climber between matches to go higher (LI said it wasn't high enough to count, at Pitt we had ~10 successful awarded climbs), and knew a 15 point climb would win the match by 7. So we abandoned our last shot and started our climb. We usually tune out cheers from the crowd, but we heard the "climb climb climb" chant. We latched at the top and the drivers put down the controllers.

And then the hollow thud as the robot fell and crashed into the batter; followed by the loudest "ooooo" from the crowd I had ever heard.

We had bent our hooks at a new angle to accommodate the higher lift, and the un-bent when hanging. The robot was fine though :) We have robot gopro video and you can see the drive team's reactions across the field through the glass at the climb and then the fall. We had a disappointing end to the regional with our laptop completely locking up during our second to last match, and another robot breaching our frame perimeter with a hard hit, tangling us, and ultimately hitting our power switch, disabling us from our last match.

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Doug, It was great seeing your team at the event. Your team and your machine reflects the effort put in by all of you.

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Ahhh - I'm not sure if someone told us it was cables, or we assumed that - but there were was something going on there. I don't think that in particular caused any issues for our drive system, I'm unsure of other robots. I wasn't a fan of the lumps at the driver's station - those really are a trip hazard as the teams run around coordinating with other teams and have an active HP running.

To clarify I do have all of the elimination matches we except for qf-1 archived and all of it will be posted tonight. I was little late as the files were on the robotics computer and not on my external hdd.

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The ridges in the driver station are caused by robots hitting the field ends with force and stretching the playing field carpet. The stretching causes the carpet beyond the end panels to bunch up more and more as matches go on.
This happens to varying extents at every event in slightly different locations. There's not an easy way to get rid of them, but the field crew tries to stretch and retape the driver carpet periodically.

We really enjoyed being at the competition.
Thank you to every one who made it possible.
Very fun and interesting game this year.
So many excellent machines!!!

Congrats
263, 287, 1156 for going up against and defeating the formidable alliance of
870, 329, 2875

We were in a strange position seeding 1st as a defense breaching hanging bot.
We built what we thought would a great pick for a two shooter alliance.
Picking first was not easy.
In hind sight it may have been sensible to go down the list picking all the great seeded shooters first hoping to be declined their by splitting up most of the two stellar shooter alliances.
Not sure that that would have worked, but it may have leveled the field for us and our great partners 1796, 4567!!
Thank you guys for working with us!!
Thoughts??

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First of all we would like to say thanks to everyone in Long Island that receives us so well. Then a special thanks to 329 that hosted our students in their homes for the competition days, was an amazing experience that our team will never forget.

Thanks 287 and 263 for joining us on that hard battle! Was great to work with you, the sinergy of our alliance made our victory possible. Congratulations to 870, 329 and 2875 for making to the finals and for the amazing 3 finals matches. We are happy that 2 of the finalist alliance will be in St. Louis representing Long Island as well. Congratulations 1796 on the Chairman's award.

We had an amazing weekend as always we had in Long Island! Thanks all the staff and people that make things happen, and thanks to Sam for the streaming, for our parents and members in Brazil it means a lot.


When we saw the final ranking, we predicted that the top 4 teams according to our scouting will be splitted in different alliances, but the fact of 1796 ended in 9º changed the scenario, so 2 of the 4 top (on our own ranking) could be together, and probably unbeatable.



That was the most unpredictable alliance selection that I participated. Again, thanks to our partners 287 and 263 for working so coordinated to defeat that amazing alliance.

Now it's time to fundraise like crazy to come back to St. Louis!
Thanks Long Island!!

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That is definitely a viable strategy. We saw it happen in NYC. The #1 seed picked the #3, #4, #5 & #6 teams.....and got turned down (which they were fairly sure would happen). So they then had effectively locked those teams into creating their own alliances.

Maybe I've just noticed it more but this year in particular the strategy of selecting your alliance partners, while blocking others has become a key and often overlooked detail.

Re: SBPLI Regional Discussion
 

Hi Doug -

Sorry for the delay. I finally got the laptop with some of our qualification match recordings from school today. Please PM me if you have some particular matches you want to see first otherwise I can just start uploading them.