As it turns out, everything. You see, grammar and spelling are important. As smart as computhief might be (and upon decoding his posts, it turns out there is some valuable information in there), I have a conflicting signal (wut, u) that his post isn't worth reading. So you see, one signal says, "Intelligent statement, pay attention," while another says, "Nothing important here, ignore".

You see, conflict.

Grammar and spelling are formalized ways of formating a wide variety of information. By using proper grammar and spelling you reduce the chance that your message will be misunderstood or ignored as noise. You also come across as at least as educated and intelligent as you really are, rather than as an ignoramus who could not communciate a simple thought even if by chance he should have one.

While this is a bit off topic for this thread, the attempt is being made to correct the behavior of somebody whose valid inputs are often ignored because they are hard to decipher. It is appropriate for a gentle rebuke to occur here where the error occured. Some of us who follow this thread are expressing our desire that communication in it remain clear to those of us who are accustomed to speaking and writing standard American English. It seems to me that computhief263 is merely trying to save on keystrokes at the expense of clarity. This is a disservice to his readers and causes us to lower our opinion of his educational attainments.

Now that at least three of us have made our objections known, we can drop the subject and return to weightier matters...

I hope that sounds really stuffy, I was trying.

I agree. From an English major, grammar, spelling, and punctuation are indeed important.

This can be further debated in a different thread, as this is obviously non-technical, and it has been brought up several times before... This is a dead horse that has been beaten one too many times and leads everyone nowhere. We'll just go on the basis of - please spell as correctly as you are able and rememeber that 'ur' and 'n', etc., are not words. You make it easier on the Chief Delphi community when you make your posts clear, concise, to the point, and complying with the English language.

With that said, everyone, you are now returned to your regularly scheduled technical forum.

2 electrical students, 2 software/electrical kids

Our team has around 19 students...

From what I saw of the setup at Nationals, all radio chanels are predefined on a per-station basis, and are tested regularly for proper communication. Each station's Arena Controller was labeled with a specific designated channel (set in dip switches I believe) such that when the OI is plugged in, it's pre-set to a constant channel for that station. All that remains is the activation of the Robot Controller, which scans all frequencies for it's team number, and auto-switches itself to the proper channel it recieves.

There were 5 fields, with 8 stations per field, yielding 40 channels. However, 8 were not in use during qualifications (from Einstein).

I believe they mapped out ahead of time which fields use which channels for which stations (A1, B1, C1, D1, A2, B2, C2, D2).

hmm... Jason, good job on asking that question. Never thought of the whole channel issue in terms of nat's, and your question brought out some of the cool behind-the-scenes work that goes into the controllers. I think its been pretty much answered in depth, but kudos for asking.

Although I do wish people would have read your full post before replying with stuff that you made clear you knew in your origional post.

Thanks for all the info everyone! I really appreciate it. I wonder if we can get FIRST and IFI to release some sort of documentation about behind the scenes tech that goes on at compitions for those of us who are interested . FIRST is all about science and technology, right? Well, teaching kids about the setup behind the fields and all the technology that goes into make everything run smoothly can only help this goal along... As for replying about other stuff, its ok. I confused some people (I have a bad habit of that :rolleyes: ) so they thought I wanted information on the competition port.....

From what i understand the reason that IFI hasn't been more forthcoming with information about the specifics of the competition port and the way they run competitions is because one of the ways that they are able to recoup some costs is by renting out the Competition Controllers (Arena Controllers) to off season competitions.

That is why alot of people were surprised when they released the documentation for the competition port this year, as they have always been protective of that information.


But yes it would be cool if they did release full documentation on the whole system.

IFI released information about the kill and channel selection options early on - Dr Joe's Yellow Dongle paper was out not long after First started using the new controller. You can have off season comps, and test your robot with this info.

The info about the auton_mode and the way to use it for testing iwhile required for testing programming, is new this year, so has not been released until this year.

IFI releases info to allow you to do things you must do to get ready for the contest, but the rest is proprietary, For instance, the standards for the communications between OI and arena controller are still clouded in secrecy, and no one is talking about pin 1 ....

<whisked away by IFI operatives before he could ...... oops, they're bac.......>:D

As we stated before, there was evidence at regionals that a team setting up for the next match and had plugged in their controller were likely to interfere with the teams currently playing on the field. Since this was more apt to happen during practice sessions, the interference was observed more during those matches. We had evidence on several occasions where robots stopped functioning due to corrupt data packets. We concluded that should enough bad data packets be received, the controller would default to a shutdown condition. A power cycle or reset would restore the original program loop and the controller would then search, acquire, and function normally if the offending interference were no longer present.
This is why it is so important for teams to only use tether in the pits. In confined areas during regionals, teams using radio links in the pits can have an effect on robots in competition.
Now, my two cents on the abbreviation issue. As a ham radio operator using Morse code, abbreviations are able to get your message through in a shorter time. The transfer rate, though, is in the 5-13 words per minute range. In a medium where the transfer is faster than the spoken word, please make full use of the language and make yourself heard and understood.
P.S. Spell check is a blessing too.

for most ISM frequency ranges, 3 channels apart are enough to prevent interference, so if you have a phone on channel one, set your wifi base station on channel 5, whatever else you have on channel 9, etc