Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

I was watching Sacramento and that one was so bad that they had the teams reverse there sides as the teams were put by the computer on the wrong side. Than In Finals 2, the Robots Attacked!!! jk. The robot's autonomous were activated during setup and 1 robot (I believe 955's) rammed into the corner goal and it looked like it could have been knocked over if it was hit any harder.

Good Luck!
Tomasz Bania

P.S. The awards ceremony happened only 4 1/2 hours later there than they were supposed to. (CEREMONY RIGHT NOW)

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

Yea, The numbers were always behind, and Paul did a great of announcing the correct team name. He mixed one number up, but oh well. He also worked in the spider monkies and Tie-dye under wear!

I can't beelive you were posting at 2 am paul!

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

NYC was good. There were some game system problems, but nothing too out there.

We knocked one of the field access doors off in autonomous and got a penelty. I think a mild hit on the door shouldn't make it fall on the field, and if it does should not be a penelty.

My two cents.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

The field at Boston had very few problems. Our automatic scoring was usually correct with the human scoring. Only one bad start during the elimination rounds because of a communication error with the blue alliance. Friday, we only had two matches that had to be restarted, once when the field randomly decided to turn on and the other from a communication error. We discovered that in the case of a tie during the elimination rounds, the score will not show.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

As some of you have said, the scoring at WI was somewhat faulty [...scoring code, done dirt cheap!] but only during autonomous modes involving big shooters like 70, 494, 1103, 1625, and most notably, 111 who seemed to trigger a restart every match. The people manually scoring, however, did an excellent job (there were at least two crew members counting the balls entered on each goal).

In terms of field work, I know that our team was responsible for 1 or 2 powerful autonomous runs to the low goal which resulted in the lefthand side of each driver's station (position 1) being shifted backwards about 3 inches. After very regrettably causing damage to another team's elegant control system early Thursday morning (it flew off of the shelf and they were unable to catch it) in auton mode, we pulled our power back a bit in the same auton mode and were able to score goals very well. As far as I saw, the field was never "realigned" because of the immense amount of work involved in doing so, but this difference was negligible over the course of the competition.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

From a driver's perspective, I had one simple problem with the field. The mid-line did not extend all the way to the edges of the field.

Now normally this really doesn't matter, but when a driver is the backbot and chasing balls around sometimes they come really close to the midline and do not want to pick up a penalty and so are being careful. But one time in SVR I remember driving to pick up a ball in the blue starting zones and realizing that from my angle I really couldn't tell if I had a wheel across the midline or not.

All the refs at midline crouched down and I just gunned it out of there to avoid a penalty but it was a close call.

I'd hope they consider extending that mid-line all the way to the edges of the field to help out the backbot driver who really doesn't have that excellent angle you have from the stands to tell where the mid-line is while cutting it close.

Anyway, back to your discussion on auto ball-counters

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

One thing that I noticed is that not every ball was counted when it went into the corner goal. We had issues with the score in a match, and they told us that they relied on the real time scoring, even though they said that it is not reliable earlier. Seems strange to me.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

Our first finals match, they didn't do the offense/defense correctly after autonomous. That caused such a huge delay to get the correct score, which ended up being a tie.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

It took 20 minutes or more to figure the correct score after someone pointed out how impossible it was to get 13 points in auto with only one robot scoring in the corner. They way I see it, too many balls came in at once, flooding the corral and triggering the auto-score to count too high. Then the computer took over. The real auto score would have been 12-10, red. The computer saw 13-12, blue, and put red on offense first.

As a side note, multiple times during the finals (mostly) matches would be replayed due to the computer not picking a team for offense or lights not being on.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

Just as an observer comparing SVR and Davis/Sacramento Regionals, the one in Davis was very efficient and had very few delays. In some cases, I thought they were actually ahead of schedule or pretty much on schedule. Not to rag on SVR, but there were some times at SVR where it was a whole half-hour behind. Looks like the field crew really did their job at Davis and got everything moving.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

Looks like there are a few regionals with "issues" that seem to have a common thread.

At the SBPLI Regional the active on screen scoring was attempted for a few of the early matches on Friday but was discarded quickly as it was not reliable info. It was never used for the rest of the regional. Not a real biggie but I know that with the scoring of this year's game many of the on field coaches had come to rely on this as a good guide to where they stood.

The ranking system was never updated after the 4th match and from Friday afternoon until literally 5 minutes before alliance selection on Saturday there was no ranking information available to the teams. Once the seeding was up the alliance selections proceeded only to be stopped after the 4th seed picked because it was discovered that a match had not been entered into the system and this affected the 5 - 8 listing of the seeded teams. As you can imagine there was a pretty good level of confusion during all of this.

To their credit the person who made the mistake, discovered it and then fixed it got on the mike and explained what happened and took the responsibility for the error. I'm sorry I don't know their name but it takes alot of character to publicly admit you made a mistake.

IMHO I believe the Regional volunteers did a great job. I do know they were understaffed on Saturday and about 5 or 6 of members of team 1468 stepped up and helped out for the rest of the regional along with members of quite a few other teams.

While this may not be specific enough for Dr. Joe's original missive the scoring and seeding information problems appear to be a common problem this year.

Oh well, Like we keep telling the J-birds team "adapt and overcome"

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

Team 533 participated in the SBPLI competition this past weekend. I would first like to say that the volunteers and FIRST representatives did an excellent job of making the best out of a bad situation. I have a unique outlook on the game. I was a mentor for Team 533 and the father of one of the referees on the field. The scoring system was a major disappointment this season. As mentioned earlier, the real time scoring was turned off due to its inaccuracy. This left teams, mentors and spectators lost and resulted in numerous arguments after the scores were posted. We also suffered numerous incorrect scorings which resulted in the wrong team winning autonomous mode. In the early rounds, when these situations were questioned, the rounds were replayed, but as the competition went on the referees became less tolerant of these challenges and replays were not allowed. The last game of the finals was played 3 times due to scoring errors (one of which was called a tie) and autonomous problems. In the end, everyone competed and everyone was a winner, but I think the scoring problems hurt FIRST's reputation with the teams, parents and spectators.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

In the two regionals we have been to Cleveland and Detroit the scoring seemed to be horrible. More so in Detroit then Cleveland but it was still bad. The problem was that there were a lot of kids tending to the field instead of refs. So therefore if we had 10 balls at the start of the game and during auto mode we went to the side goal and dumped all the balls not one came out we only got credit for about 6 of them and ended up loosing auto mode because of this. Many balls were not counted like they should have been because the crew was to busy paying attention to other things. In cleveland it seemed that there were only a few ties at the end of the competition. 3 of them belonged to us and I think that's all there was. We were leading the match 47-16 and back to back matches they said that our matches ended up in a 17-17 tie. Is that possible to go from that lead to a tie not once but twice with the same score. There were no penalities in the match and if we correctly did the scoring in our heads then we should have won out matches my somewhat of a lead. The last match they said that we won and then about 3 matches later they said they made a mistake and that was a tie but there was no explaination. When asking the refs they really had nothing to say. It seemed that this year FIRST relied more on the youth then the adults and I don't feel that if you are on a FIRST team you should be allowed to work at a competition where your team is at. I know they want to help and that's what FIRST is about but if they are on a team who's to say they aren't fudging a score? It seemed that there were many field scorers that belonged on teams and I don't feel that is is right to do that. Correct me if I'm wrong but that's how I feel about it because not everyone involved in FIRST is a perfect person. I also didn't feel that it was right that if a ball went in the center goal and bounced out that it wasn't counted. It was scored into the goal and came out for reasons unknown. That happened MANY times in Detroit. Some of the balls were getting counted a few times because if the balls were jammed and they had to take the stick to poke it it triggered the camera a few times then need be. Did anyone else seem to have and of these problems? hopefully our last competition in Philly will be better.

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

OK - you are wrong! No one in FIRST is perfect! But I'll bet that not one of those volunteers set out to cheat you. They too were victims of a good idea gone bad. You should apologize right here - right now!

Re: Week 4: So how's that Field Working?
 

Please remember that the upper goal balls were only counted in the scoring system when they triggered a switch in the downtube leading to the can at the bottom of the goal. This downtube is only slightly larger than the ball diameter and was/is actually a simple and accurate system. There are no cameras on the upper goal. While we may not agree about balls bouncing out not counting ( I actually think it's fair because it's the same for everybody. A camera would have most likely added an additional level of inaccuracy. ie: count a ball twice as it goes in and then bounces out of the goal.)

From what I have seen and read the brunt of the problem appears to be with the lower goals and the possibility that a longer ball settlement period is necessary after autonomous to insure that all upper goal balls drop through the tube.