Pittsburgh, wrap up and frustrations
 

Heh, if you were at Pittsburgh you probably heard our story.

Wednesday afternoon, Andy B calls Fedex to check on our crate. It was still in St Louis. Yikes! After several hours of phone calls, he got it overnighted to Pittsburgh for a hefty charge. It was supposed to be there at 10:30 AM Thursday. So at that time Thursday, we called. Well the plane it was supposed to be on had mechanical failure and was grounded. They tried to get it to another plane, but they missed the connection in Memphis. So we didnt get our bot till Friday morning.

Thats not all.

We planned on spending all day Thursday refitting the machine and fixing gearboxes, redoing some wiring and tweak auton mode. We agreed to miss all matches on Friday until that was done and just send a HP to be there. We got working Friday afternoon and we came out and won our first match off the bat. 2nd match we were in, we broke a weld on a shaft in our secondary gearbox. We missed our last match of the day repairing that. Friday we made it to the first match, and broke another one! Ahh we almost decided to give up and decline any pickings. But thanks to the wonderful pit crew, we got back up and running just minutes before alliance selections. Team 448 and 1114 selected us as their third partner and we ran the whole match we participated in without breaking anything. Finally we still have a bit of work to do in Chicago, but nothing major. This regional was probably the most exciting one I have been to.

I would personally like to thank all the teams, officials, and volunteers for supporting us all through the weekend. The wild applause and cheering for us when we were announced as the winners of the J&J Sportsmanship award really made me and the rest of the team feel good about ourselves that we have all of your support.

Special Thanks to team 448 and 1114 for selecting us in their finals alliance. You guys took a big risk by selecting us, but we hope we met your expectations and I would really like to work with you guys again.

Thanks to team 217, The Thunderchickens. Those guys were their offering support the whole weekend. You guys are awesome!

Finally, thanks to team 128 for cheering for us and keeping our morale level high. You guys were our saviors and kept us going :)

Re: Pittsburgh, wrap up and frustrations
 

lol that sucks man, atleast you got your bot, that is a good thing.

Re: Re: Pittsburgh, wrap up and frustrations
 

And it 90% works too :)

sorry to hear that happened to you all, but glad to hear you all were able to bounce back from it.

You're scaring me man...
 

your shipping trouble is exactly what I fear will happen on the last week of regionals for teams shipping FEDEX to Texas. Supposedly there is an agreement between FIRST and carrier. I sure hope so.

WC:cool:

uh oh. 810 has three regionals back to back. we just shipped the bot yesterday, it's supposed to be at FESTO today, if not tomorrow. if it isn't, i will kill someone, as we finally got everything working, and the bot had better show up so we can have some fun :).

Grr!
 

If anyone saw our horrible performance...well...

I'm really angry...

We had a good robot, but we NEED NEW DRIVERS BAD!

shipping frustrations
 

We have heard so many teams complain about the shipping situation. Nothing as horrible as this, though. Team Roboto's Leader was told after the St. Louis Regional that they were going to be disqualified for Chicago because the team lost all of their airbills and used one of ours that we were not going to use! (And this was not a FIRST person going to disqualifiy them, but the shipping people!) By the time it was over, the carrier's had Marci balling! It was horrible!!

WHY CAN'T WE CHOOSE WHO WE SHIP OUR ROBOT WITH? It's nice of Fed Ex to give the gift of free shipping, but for my team, we have free shipping with BAX Global and we were told that FIRST wouldn't even allow them on the property because of their deal with Fed Ex! I hope they consider giving us the option to choose next year.

To team 45....congratulations on getting through such a nightmare with your head up!!! You guys are a class act.

The moral of the story: call your shipper early and often if you're doing back to back events! A valiant effort, though, from the TechnoKats. I would expect no less of such a great team.

Tom the FedEx guy strikes again?

I'm sorry about all your trouble with the crates. I hope everyone (from now on) doesn't have to worry about all of that... Sounds like a bad fluke, hopefully the last one.

Your J&J Sportsmanship award was well deserved. Good luck in Chicago, I'll be cheering you on!

That's the great thing about competition amongst businesses.
More people to fire.

Heh. We where right next to them, and they where cool as a cucumber. I congrats you.

Our robot arrived fine, on time, but we did get into some major trouble. We had an inspector come over and give us the hardest time about everything! Our light was visible from all directions when on the ground (we are only 14" high), but when it was on our crate (which is about 3-4 feet higher) you could see it, but not as easily. We got burned for that, but we said ok and lifted it a little higher. Next was our air pressure. We had our regulator at 60, and all was good, but he said that we HAD to have a gage between the compressor and the accumulator. What is that? There are others, and i'm sure that DJ know what they are, as well as others. This could of been a great regional, but with the lack of coordination and judgment, it really sucked for my-self.

I would love to thank teams 274 and 1218 for being our partners and choosing us. I wish to say to them that we are looking in to what happened, and we have not found anything. (I think there is something rotten in the state of Denmark...)

DJ... You may wish to change your avatar soon...before nats....:D

Yeah, you are right...the wings should be eliminated by then ;)


Anyway

The funniest thing happened when we were putting our robot back in the crate on Saturday. We had the 4 labels to put on each side of the crate...Well all 4 get put on and the 2 side and back ones say "Send to Reliant Park, Houston, Tx for April 10th-12th." I screamed "NO!!! NOT AGAIN!" Our front label said to ship to the midwest regional, but the other three. Wouldnt that have been horrible to arrive at chicago with our robot in houston?! :ahh:

FUN!
 

I don't know about you guys, but I thought Pittsburgh was great! Even though we didnt have our robot on Thursday it gave us time to go around and help others, as well as get our pit set up. Then on Friday we had to miss somewhere around 5 qualification matches (sorry to our partners), but this helped get our robot better. By taking apart the robot, changing some of things around the tracks, adding different gearboxes, and completely rewiring the whole rear end our robot runs pretty well. The few matches we ran (and when the output shafts didnt break) the robot ran great! By far the best I've seen.

Thanks to all the teams that lent us the things we needed during the weekend, and to 128 for cheering for us and giving us all the candy!!!

My faith this weekend in our robot increased a 100 times and I'm ready for Chicago!! :D

Your welcome for everything! We were jsut try our best to give back to your great team! 45 has helped us last year alot and we are jsut glad that our happy attitude rubbed off on you guys! good luck and we hope to see you guys again! We love you guys!

Pittsburgh lessons
 

We did learn some lessons in Pittsburgh... and I wanted to post this today so that other teams will not make the same mistake we did.

This was the first time that we ever tried to go to back to back regionals.

We "assumed" too much. We really made 2 mistakes:

1. We should've used Midwest Conference Services' preferred shipper to insure that our robot would be picked up from St. Louis on Saturday (FedEx has no Saturday pickup). MCS would've made sure our crate was going to be in Pittsburgh.

2. We should've called FedEx to coordinate a pickup at the St. Louis Drayage site on Monday morning. We did not do this, and we assumed that MCS was going to handle this... wrong. FedEx picked the crate up on Wednesday (the day before practice in Pittsburgh!).

So... I spend 1/2 of our drive on the phone with MCS, Yellow Freight (the Drayage site), and FedEx on Wednesday, trying to line up a next day ship directly to the arena. We thought that would work, but due to a mechanical failure on a FedEx plane, the crate did not get in the Pittsburgh area until Friday morning.

So... if you are playing in back to back regionals (or in the last regional to the Championships), I strongly suggest coordinating your speedy shipping needs with the local Midwest Conference Service reps at your competition and to not use FedEx. This is actually printed in the FIRST manual under shipping... we just needed to READ THE MANUAL.

This is our team's fault (me and another guy are taking the heat). We do not blame FedEx or MCS. We should read the manual.

Please learn from our mistake.

Andy B.

ps... any of you who read this and are going to back to back competitions - please send this note to your team leaders. You do not want them to make the same mistake we did.

pss... I suppose what comes around goes around... who would've thought that my "Tom the FedEx guy" prank in 2002 would come back to haunt us.

We Goofed
 

:( At last weekend's Pittsburgh Regional, my team, team 448, was one of two teams disqualified from a match for spectator signaling. Out violation was due to a misunderstanding of the rules on our part, and we hold nothing against the referees or our opponents. We had no intention of breaking a rule, or creating and unfair advantage. The truth is, we messed up. We have accepted the consequences for our actions, and we want to be able to regain the trust of the teams at that competition. We ask that the community forgive us for our "unprofessional" behavior.

:) On a lighter note, we would like to thank Team 45 for stepping in to help our alliance, and we admire your ability to deal with a lousy situation.

We would also like to extend a congratulations to team 1114 on their well deserved Rookie All-Star Award, and only wish that their first elimination rounds could have ended better for them.

As a general observation, I noticed that the teams at the Pitt Regional were on the whole, an awesome group of people. I've been to many regionals at several locations over the past four years, and I'd like to point out that the folks at this event seemed to me to be the most amicable I've come across.

Finally, to Mr. Fluck, I think you need to re-think your hockey allegiances. I clearly remember a 7-0 rout last year that your Aves were on the losing side of.

Re: We Goofed
 

what exactly happened? (i want to make sure i don't do it by accident)

As one sitting at the scorers bench I know the delema that the Refs went through. We tried announcing about the signaling and hoped that everyone knew. You where the second team DQ'd but your team did admit to the error rather than try to make up excusses. To err is human and to admit to it supreme. Your team did an awsome job and helped make mine easier.

We got lucky
 

With the hand signals thing.

I, and another boy on my team were using hand signals to guide our driver. (Obviously, that didn't work, because he wanted to do his own thing) who was supposed to use those signals to indicate scores, stacks, and where to go without beating the robot up.

When we heard that we couldn't use them, my heart jumped, because I couldn't remember reading about that. I DO remember reading about the two-way radio thing, but NOT hand signals. Maybe I need to go over the rule book again, huh?

Personally, I think that the 'rule' is not the greatest, in fact some may say it's retarded. I really don't see why the rule exists. I am a driver and, i don't know about you, but i NEVER look at the audience, i always have my eyes on the robot, whether the real thing, or its image on the big screen, never other people. I also believe that if someone were on my team and they were REALLY excited about the match and got their adrenaline flowing that they might give a few hand signals, that would never be seen by the drive team but noticed by the refs, therefore DQing the team, unfortunatly, even though they would seldom help the driver anyway. If the driver did, have we ever heard of TEAMWORK, and if one team communicates w/ hand signals there would be nothing hindering another's ablility to give them just as well. So i don't see why its a problem.

The people in question where sitting alone behind the opposing team. They where seen signaling the mentor or human player. I believe by the reaction of the driver that they had no idea what was happening. This did not alter what happened. The following link to the FIRST forum might help clarify the rule.

http://jive.ilearning.com/thread.jsp...rt=0&trange=30

hand signaling is bad, but yelling is ok. that's good, because when i'm not a human player, i yell like there is no tomorrow:ahh:

As I read this, i have this nagging feeling in my stomach that we did not place the labels for San Jose on the crate. I knew I should of stayed and packed up the crate instead of going off to the stands to watch finals. Oh well...I hope whoever loaded the crate knew what they were doing.

Cory

I couldnt agree more...i hardly hear what my coach says when im driving, let alone pay attention to people in the stands.

Questions
 

Just wondering, but has anyone experienced this at any of the west coast regionals? I think they did it at St. Louis too. In the quarter finals when it was us (45) and 1114 on the field 448 was standing behind us. At first we were going to have them stand right behind us and give us directions, but then we asked the head ref and he said "no, they can't do that" "they are spectators".

Oh well.
:)

I agree that i wouldn't be able to see any hand signals coming from the stands...matches are a blur to me. I just do my job and pay attention to the robot and occasionaly try to see what other robots are doing. I can hear the base driver and i can hear the coach occasionaly, and i even heard the announcer a few times but thats it.

Why are hand signals bad but yelling directions would be okay, that doesn't make sense.

I think the idea is to prevent any unfair advantages of a team willing to use hand signals to either guide a robot out of a sticky situation (since it's difficult to see short robots on the opposite side of the ramp), or to ensure the robot is properly aligned in scoring position on top of the ramp, or how much farther to move left or right to make sure a bin is in position to be dropped onto a stack. These situations would alter the outcome of a match by someone other than the 4 legal people in the driver stations, and can easily be used if a driver is told to look at person X in the crowd to figure out where to move.

45's heart break