Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

How did the radios and field control/scoring system work?

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

The field control/scorekeeping is, in a word, magnifique.

The next test: will it work as awesome next October when we have to use it at RiverRage? Time will tell. But for now, my mind is at ease.

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

We experienced many losses of radio signal, and we heard from other teams that had similar experiences. The longest loss for us I think was a full 10 seconds (the drivers say 30, but I think being dead on the field for any time seems like an eternity)

We are in the process of trying the IFI recommendations for improving reception.

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

At some point we were contolling other robots on the field

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

We also had problems with our radio early on. Ended up moving the radio away from all metal and the power wires. We also made sure we had a fully charged back up battery and these changes solved the problem for the finals.

I don't know if anyone else noticed but the refs seemed to be getting tired towards the end of the event. The rack was being moved less and less before the matches.

Thanks Teams 178 and 176 for picking us. We thought we were going home early!

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

Tired backup battery may explain our practice problems. Moving the radio up and away does seem to help quite a bit. This will be tough for teams with metal ramps mounted vertically.

Your team always plays smart in eliminations, The Enforcers did well to pick you.

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

There are still some issues with the scoring system:

2 teams were scheduled for 6 matches, when 3 was the average, 1 team was only scheduled for 2 matches.

Some teams had the same partners, and played the same teams for most of their matches.

They had to manually adjust the final rankings, as the teams that played more matches got more qual. points.

We had to wait for the scorers to run through 8 matches to reach the elimination rounds, the system would only allow for 8 team final round play.

They did not have the final tree, and the alliance selection portions working.

Something about the Ref's not being able to adjust the scores after the submit button was pushed.

There was a problem with the PDA being used on the Blue side for the scoring during one match, think the operator pushed the wrong button at the wrong time.

Overheard a discussion between the scoring system people and I think a FIRST engineer while helping to take down the field.

While not perfect, the parts that worked seamed to work well. But lets remember this years field, and no automatic scoring make things easier.

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

First i want to say Thank You to all of team 176; Aces High, the FIRST staff that came down from NH and all the volunteers who made this event come off as smooth as it did for everyone.


I will try to cover these to the fullest extent.

Pairings for Quals, there was a small glitch that has since been changed that paired the teams for their first match and then just repeated them.

The teams being in an odd # of matches has to do with the odd number of teams that showed. IIRC 6 cant go evenly into 29.

Rankings and Alliances; That part was not 100% yet, thats why it was done "the old way". It will be good for week 1.

Audience displays were put in a priority list to get done behind system functionality, they will be done soon if not all ready.

Adjusting Scores, That was fixed before the event was done.

Ipaq's scoring issue on blue. A Human Player stepped on and broke one of the cable adapters during the match, thus dropping the unit from the network that match.

A big hand goes out to this years development team. The [3] guys came to the scrimmage from 2 states and worked through out the whole event with input from FIRST and other members, to fix some bugs and add in some more functionality.

Also a huge thank you goes to IFI's Corey and Ricky coming from Texas on Friday to also do testing on their systems and helping out all the teams that asked for it.

I look forward to next week and having our first set of regional's go off with a great game to play!

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

If it was done correctly, the worst-case situation should be that 5 teams play one extra match - meaning that there was a single team who didn't get enough matches scheduled so one more match was added, with 5 "filler" teams to pad it out. If there's a team playing 2 (or 3!) more matches than another team then something was not done right.

Re: Pre-Shipdate UTC Scrimmage
 

To me those don't sound like small bugs that are corner cases; they're all in the regular operation of the scoring system. The randomization of matches is something that should have been implemented, tested, and debugged months ago, not discovered the first time it was used at a scrimmage. Honestly I'm worried that all the features weren't implemented and tested sooner. If features that are easily tested and those that are the core of the scoring system weren't rock solid last weekend what corner cases have not been tested yet? I hope this year's developers designed their system well and have thoroughly tested it. No one wants a repeat of the past two years.