Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

I have been around for a lot of elimination matches I can say that seeing another alliance use their timeout card to benefit an opposing alliance is a very rare happening indeed. It's an act of Gracious Professionalism that deserves some serious respect.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

I didn't realize that they did that. Thanks for showing us all what gracious professionalism means, Alliance #3!

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Thanks to 254 and all the volunteers from other teams for putting on what is clearly the best run CA offseason event.

The Greybots had a great time as usual, and look forward to coming back next year.

I was pretty hands for the event, but I know my kids had a great time working and playing with 696, 5924 and 254.

I wouldn't even call it an upset!

3250's robot is very, very good. Great up close 1241 style shot, and an unblockable shot from the defenses that is very accurate.

They should be proud of the work they put in, and hopefully we get a chance to play with them at Capital City Classic.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Thank you to 254 for another amazing event. It's strange to think that this was the last Chezy Champs I'd attend as a student, but it was definitely a great last event and I hope to be back in the future in some way or another.

Thank you to 4488, 3250, and 2073--it was an honor to play with you guys. Thanks for looking past our issues on Saturday and selecting us to your alliance.
4488, I still remember the first time I heard of your team, when I saw your 2014 reveal video. I've watched each one since, and been amazed by all. I'm glad I finally got the chance to see one up close.
3250, beautiful robot, and definitely one of the best there. Hard to believe I haven't seen you play in person since my freshman year, but hopefully I'll see you guys again soon.
2073, I honestly can't believe you fell that far or got picked after us. A friend and I ranked teams on Saturday night, and you were high on our list. It's hard to believe it's been almost 3 years since Sac 2014, but it was great to alliance together again.

Congratulations to 971, 1678, 604, and 2135 on a well deserved win. Your alliance was just amazing to watch. The sheer number of boulders scored was just scary (in a good way).

Also, a thank you 254, 2135, and 1678 for letting us borrow your USB cable, ethernet dongle, and pistons. We definitely wouldn't have made it as far as we did without you guys.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

We had a solid run as an alliance and a great time as a team, I'd like to second that thanks to 968 and 5812, and of course, back to you guys at 5012.

I'd also like to thank 254 and all the volunteers it took to make Chezy Champs such a success. We at 114 used it as a way to involve new members to the team, and Chezy Champs offers an environment that shows off the best of FIRST.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

The Awtybots have made it safely back home to Texas. We had a blast meeting and competing with everyone at Chezy! It was an awesome experience and a very well run event!

Thanks to 5803, 3663 and 701 for having us apart of your alliance. It was great talking strategy with you guys and seeing how your teams work. 701's scouting program was awesome to get a look at during lunch. We appreciate you guys giving us a chance even though our robot had issue after issue throughout the event until it finally gave out at the end.

Once again, thanks to 254 for inviting us to Chezy Champs. It was an honor to be invited to play with the Best of the West!

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

If your team had issues with an unexpected estop, can you please PM me? I would love to get access to some log files and get a description of when this occurred and some general description of your team's robot.

Greg McKaskle

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Hi Greg, I don't know what information you have on this already, but I saw it at least 3 times. I was working as an FTAA at CC. Every time we saw the unexpected estop, it appeared in Autonomous right around .006 -.007 seconds into the match.
The theory was, it was somehow cached by the DS prior to the start of the match, and sent to the FMS as soon as the the Autonomous Enable packet was received.
The workaround we used was to have each team restart the DS software as soon as they arrived at the field to connect and set up. As far as I am aware, no erroneous estops occured when this process was followed.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Thanks, Bill, for the information. Quick clarifification that the Cheesy Arena logs show that no robots were e-stopped and this manifested on the FMS side as lost robot communications. Possibly a bug in the driver station software. The fix Bill describes worked well throughout our event.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Xavier,

254 is thrilled that 5829 was able to make it to the event - your team is a class act and it is always a blast playing with new teams that we don't normally see at the California regionals.
We're glad you had a great time and hope you'll consider coming back in future years.

Nick

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

I'd like to extend my thank you to Team 254, Bellarmine College Prep, and all of the Chezy Champs volunteers for putting on this event. Chezy Champs has been an event that Team 696 has looked forward to every year for the past three years, and we hope that we can attend again next year! This year the event continued to run in its very polished ways, from the teams to competing to those who allowed us to be able to compete. Thank you all for your hard work in making the 2016 Chezy Champs as amazing as we all knew it would be. We understand the level of coordination and planning needed to make an event of this scale run so smoothly, and we appreciate it all.

Thank you to the referees, volunteers, and FTA crews who helped us along the way this past weekend. We were constantly plagued through Saturday and Sunday by intermittent controls systems issues that we have yet to repeatably replicate, but the support and generosity shown was very gracious of them to offer. To the GameSense crew, your work and coverage of Chezy Champs has been impeccable and only been getting better. For us, being featured on the big screen was an honor and a pleasure to be a part of.

To our elimination partners of 254, 973, and 5924, thank you for inviting us to join your alliance. We had a great time playing with you all, and being able to collaborate with you opened our eyes to how the best teams operate in eliminations. We played in the semifinals when our alliance captain was down, and being able to even stand on the same side of the glass with these teams was an experience in itself. Thank you for the opportunity to play despite our spotty performance during qualifications.

Congratulations of course to 971, 1678, 604, and 2135. Your alliance displayed immense scoring abilities on the field, and it was a delight to watch those matches. To the third alliance of 4488, 3250, 1868, and 2073, you put on a wonderful show in semifinals against our alliance and within the finals. Your alliance was another formidable collection of teams amongst the many others at Chezy Champs.

Thanks for bringing together the Best in the West!

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Wow! Once again, 254 has put on another great Chezy Champs competition. 971 was honored to compete with the Best of the West.

Thanks to our great alliance, 1678, 604 and 2135. Speaking for myself, those are three of my favorite teams. Thanks for carrying the alliance when our chain tensioner broke. We knew you could do it.

The alliance of 4488, 3250, 1868, and 2073 worked together well and were responsible for some very intense and very fun final matches. Thanks to 4488 for coming all the way down here to compete with and against us. It was great seeing 3250 play so well, you were good during the season but really stepped it up a level during the off-season. Your alliance played good strategy and benefited from help from solid performances by 1868 and 2073. We look forward to playing with all of you in the future.

Also, thanks to GameSense for great color commentary. It is another thing that makes Chezy Champs special.

Until next year ...

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Wow. What a weekend.

First of all, I've got to give a HUGE shoutout to Nick Eyre and the rest of the crew at 254 for putting on an absolutely incredible event. Especially Nick, who filled almost every key volunteer role throughout the entire weekend. You deserved that volunteer of the year award!

Another shoutout to all the teams in attendance, especially all the teams that made it to eliminations. You were all a joy to work with, and it was an honor to meet you all and see your robots up close.

Lastly, I had one big takeaway from Chezy Champs: I love volunteering! I did field reset for all three days and had so much fun. So much fun that I'll probably be volunteering at Capital City Classic as well :D (though doing something else this time).

Once again, thanks to everyone for making this event awesome!

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Hello All,

You many find robot photos taken at the event here. If you would like to have the RAW files taken at the event, please email peter@team254.com.

In addition, general event photos can be found here.

Thank you all for coming to Chezy Champs, and we're looking forward to seeing all the teams next year!

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Kennedy's robot has come a long way to reach the top in Northern California. Congrats!

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Team 5924 can't thank 254 enough for not only choosing us to be on your alliance, but also for putting on such a world class event.

We were amazed at the level of competition at Chezy Champs. It was a higher level of play than either regional we attended last season with top robots from up and down the west coast. It truly was the "Best in the West."

It's always fun to watch and compete with/against juggernauts like 971 and 1678 (thanks for the compliment Steve!), and equally fun to see good robots become great. 3250 went from having a Harrison Barnes high goal shot to more of a Steph Curry arc shot that went in every time from all over the courtyard and outer works. Also great to witness really good teams we were unfamiliar with like 4488 from the Pacific Northwest competing as well.

Thank you to all the teams we competed with and against for giving our students and mentors yet another incredible FIRST experience. Love the GreyBots (973) and it was awesome to finally be on an alliance with your team. Thank you to the kids from 115 for the help in the pits, and the other students and mentors from previously mentioned teams for help as well.

Finally, I have to mention how classy it was (and truly exemplary of what FIRST is all about) for the #3 alliance in the playoffs to use their timeout to give the students on the #2 alliance extra time to try to fix one of our robots. I'll never forget that regardless of the fact there still wasn't enough time to repair the broken gearbox.

Good luck with the rest of your respective offseason events, and next season. Events like this reinforce why we all spend so many hours of our lives dedicated to FRC.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

3476 had a great time at Chezy Champs. We had a lot of fun with our alliance partners 3859, 1967 and 841. It was nice to get a big score on the board. Congratulations to 971, 1678, 604 and 2135 for winning and 4488, 3250, 1868, and 2073 for being finalists. Keep an eye on 3250, I bet they are the next powerhouse of California.

What I like most about this event, is how much teams help one another, at that is considering that teams already help each other a lot at most events. 3476 had a rough event, we broke a lot of stuff and the number of teams stopping by the see if we need help was staggering. A big thank you to 971, 4488, and 3309 for your help. A big thank you to Kiet, Thad and Austin for figuring out many of our problems. We had a very positive experience figuring out our issues with Chezy Arena. We were given very detailed information and advice to address our issues. We were given the option to replay our matches but we declined partly due the superb efforts by the CC volunteers to fix our issue. We asked for help and found people eager to help and make our day better. Thanks for the fun weekend.

A big shout out to game sense for the commentary, as we were getting our robot back to its old self, the students were listening to the commentary for a boost in morale. The students were elated and were quoting game sense all weekend.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Can you elaborate on the problem and fix? We had issues too, where our controller would reboot or something upon field connection, causing our arm's encoder position to be lost prior to the start of the match.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

I'm very interested in hearing more about this issue and what potentially caused it, as we're going to be using Cheesy Arena at Capital City Classic. Do you have any more details or theories? I know about the e-stop bug, but this is obviously separate.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

The issue Code Orange had with their robot was related to a timing issue in Cheesy Arena during autonomous. There was a specific WPILib timing function that was not receiving the right inputs from the FMS (the GetMatchTime function). Most cases I've seen that use that function use it during teleop to detect the end of the match, which was correct. However, this has been fixed in Cheesy Arena, so Beach Blitz and Capital City Classic should not have this issue.

Regarding the e-stop issue, we are still working with FIRST to try and detect the cause and institute a fix. Our plan during Beach Blitz if we see it is to immediately replay the match, as the issue pops up right at the beginning of the match.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

At this time, the e-stop issue appears to be manifestation of the DS being in "FMS Lite" mode and not having the space bar estop disabled. Until we have a solid answer as to the root cause, and/or a fix for the issue, CCC will be implementing the same workaround we used at Chezy Champs. Specifically, teams will be requested to restart the DS software before each match. In addition, we will also take the approach that Beach Blitz is using of immediately restarting a match where the estop issue pops up.
These are minor adjustments, but for the integrity of the tournament, we feel these measures are necessary.

BTW, if you were not aware, the new binaries for Cheesy Arena were posted 2 days ago. They include all updates from the start of Chezy Champs until now.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Close... We still need to figure out how to pull the updated configs off the router used at CC which open up the ports used by smart dashboard and others.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

On behalf of Team 254, I wanted to thank everybody for your patience with the FMS at Chezy Champs. The e-stop issue, which was experienced by teams at Chezy Champs (using Cheesy Arena) and at SCRRF Fall Classic (using FIRST FMS Lite) seems to be a bug in the driver station software, and is being investigated by National Instruments. At Chezy Champs, we believe that we replayed the matches with e-stop issues where the head referee determined that the outcome of the match was affected. I do not believe that the issue appeared during the elimination matches. For future off-seasons, we recommend that you have each team restart the driver station app prior to each match, as described above by Bill. Our sincere apologies go out to any teams whose matches were missed.

When setting up the field for Chezy Champs, several code changes were made to Cheesy Arena and to the configuration of the advanced networking hardware. None of these changes were in regards to the e-stop issue, which we believe is a driver station bug affecting FMS Lite as well as Cheesy Arena. These changes can be downloaded as a released binary on Github. For Beach Blitz and CCC, which are using the Chezy Champs hardware, the updated networking configuration is already on the equipment.

As a reminder, if you have any feedback about the event, we'd love to hear it on this form. From the feedback thus far, it sounds like most teams' experiences were positive, and we've taken some notes on things to improve for next year. In particular, we got very positive feedback for "254 losing", and will be sure to schedule that in next year ;). We hope that we will see many of the same teams back next year and that this event continues to grow and improve.

-Nick

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Router or Switch? The only router I am aware of being used was to provide access to the Internet to allow uploads/Downloads to/from BlueAlliance and maybe the video stream.

If you are referring to the Cisco 3550 switch, getting the config off is fairly straight forward, as long as you have physical possession of it :D .

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Switch. We forgot to grab the configs before sending it off to Beach Blitz. We'll get them and post on Github once the equipment returns.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Wow, that's pretty discouraging that teams would write that of the event hosts, who go through such tremendous efforts and costs (both financial and personal) to put on this event. 254's robot suffered a rare and completely unexpected "perfect storm" of failures, at the worst time possible. It was something that was really unfortunate and I wouldn't wish upon any team, but such things happen even to some of the world's best. Nonetheless, thank you to our gracious hosts for making this high-quality event possible for California teams.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

It seems that there are some of us who can still learn something about Gracious Professionalism

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Nick is just including a bit of self-deprecating humor. To me, it reads as if he is joking about teams being happy about 254 losing.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

He was making it into a joke, but "254 losing" was listed multiple times as the most positive aspect of the event.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Ah. Well, he proved himself gracious and professional by taking the affront lightly.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Wow, this is kind of suprising/upsetting for me considering how hard 254 works to put on CC. It is in no way easy to put on a high quality off-season. Regardless on how you feel about any team--respect should be paramount.

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

I second this thought. I don't think others appreciate the great effort that the Poofs went to in putting on an event that's every bit as good as a Regional. And we didn't appreciate that a fully effective 254 robot wasn't playing in the end (even though we thought that Shockwave's alliance still was in a very strong position to win that semifinal.)

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

Greg,

Are you still interested in getting more info on the issue?

We still have driver station log files for our match 30 (replayed later) where we were told an estop had occurred immediately at the start of the match.

Jeff

Re: Chezy Champs 2016
 

After Chezy Champs, did anyone happen to find a pair of black steel pole bases, perhaps out near the curb/planter near the loading area? Approximately 18" square, 1/4" steel plate with rounded corners and a handle cutout, with an aluminum machined cylinder piece in the middle, and a 1/4-20 bolt in the side of that piece. Thanks.