Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

In regards to the Safety Award, enough is enough. I agree with all those above me that are tired of teams posting a million signs just so they can win the Safety Award. You don't have to do this at all. In 2008 our team won the award at Florida and got 2nd in Colorado; we didn't post a single sign. Yes we would yell "ROBOT" just so people would get out of the way, but we didn't go out of our way. We made sure everything we did in the pit was being done in a safe manner. We just did what every team should do anyway. And for that we won the award. In Colorado the Safety Inspectors actually talked with us to see what sorts of things we do as a team to teach/stress safety, I think that is how teams should "earn" the award. Otherwise its just becoming a joke.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

To start off, just as it's been said before. A good many thanks to all of the volunteers from this season! Your time and dedication is greatly appreciated by us participants.

Now for the low points...

Bumpers:
I'm from the old days where there were no bumpers, so personally I hate them with a passion! There was nothing better than hearing that loud wonderful CLANG, and wondering "Did they just bend the frame??!!". Now the problems with the awful things is that if you were inspected and passed. That means your bumpers were said by the inspectors that they were legal and that they would not get you in trouble in competition! This was FALSE at VCU. There was at least one occasion where a teams bumpers were passed and upon leaving the field it was found that they were not legal and they were given penalties.

Inspections:
I have had the opportunities to meet some awesome inspectors and have known a few for quite some time. That being said, all of the inspectors are good folks and mean well. I do understand the "pity pass" having received one before. (Pity Pass - basically your robot stinks worse than my gym shoes, it won't get into the finals no matter what. So the inspectors pass you out of pity, and the robot may move but never really do much than twitch on the field.) Now, the "pity pass" is one thing, but the way some inspections went this year were a pain! I know at one regional I attended I heard teams saying "don't go to that inspector again he won't pass us for...". NOT COOL! For both inspectors and teams! It would see to me that it would be a good idea for an inspector that started a robot inspection should be the one to finish it, making sure that things are consistent. But that being said, inspectors should be more uniform in their inspections! Teams and FIRST need to work on this one.

Referees:
WOW! Is all I can say. I didn't notice the grievances I have in Atlanta but at regionals, HOLY CRAP! I know that everyone means well, but I have to question if some people should even be refs! First issue, I understand that the Refs can not see everything, but if you are going to call a penalty for team X you need to call it for team Y as well. At one regional I was at, some penalties were not even being called as the rules stated! Again I know there is a lot of pressure on these people, but maybe we should follow the NHL to an extent. Get some Refs watching on camera somewhere else, to offer help, or maybe get instant replay. I think this would take some questions out of calls.

Seeding Points:
This was beyond confusing! And was just plain silly! I have a solution! 2 points for a win, 1 point for a tie and 0 for a loss. But what if you have two teams with the same amount of seeding points, then go with the scores the team in their match. Somewhat annoying but the higher scoring robot gets spot 1.

Safety Award:
If I go to another event and have a student yell in my ear in a shrill voice "MOVE ROBOT". I think I may loose my hearing! Let's set up some better criteria for this award.

FMS/Control System:
HOLY CRAP!!! I'm no expert with these things, but someone dropped the ball big time! I have no clue how to ever start getting this fixed. But I do know that it could have caused dangerous situations! By the time I got my students out of VCU, all loaded up, and fed, we did not get home till after 1AM on the drive to Cary, NC. Combined with the lack of sleep and long drive, I had to switch off with someone else to drive the 15 passenger van for the students. If I had fallen asleep at the wheel, someone could have been hurt.

EDIT: Autonomous Bonus Points seem like they are over, and for good reason! Autonomous Mode has been around since 2003. Veteran teams, if you don't have it by now you are behind the ball. Rookie teams, there are a good many resources available to you so that you should be able to program autonomous. There is no excuse to not being able to. I do not enjoy programming, I hate it, but even I, a programming moron, can make some form of autonomous code, even if it is just going forward and then blowing up because I touched the code...

One thing I know from experience is that if you are going to complain, you need to offer a solution! I've tried to do that, but my solutions are under-developed. I'm sure we could sit here all day and nit pick F.I.R.S.T. about the problems of this season, and last season, and many other seasons. There were some things this year that did catch a good amount of attention, but I trust that F.I.R.S.T. will fix it by next year.

Ivey

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Broadcasting (via TV or webcast) FIRST Championship has been discussed in older threads, for instance: FIRST Championship: Made for TV? (with links to even earlier threads).

Currently, the external feed is the same as that on the screen behind the field, intended for viewing by the spectators. There is no requirement to coordinate this projected video with game announcer's audio. The earlier threads discuss some "tweaks" to the AV service provided at FIRST Championship to better serve a broader (i.e. sports-oriented) audience. At the minimum, a simple, full-field camera feed would go a long way to satisfy scouts, fans, and general viewers of the competitions.

How much longer before FRC broadcasts truly capture the strategy, skill and excitement of the matches??

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

At the Las Vegas regional we constantly checked the PSI of the balls to make sure they were at 9 PSI. It worked out fine and when the balls started getting beat up we swapped them out with a new one.:D


Few thing we hated was the reusing of the cRio and modules, compressor, and battery (our previous ones all died) was not my favorite thing because it totally ruined our 09 robot. For the battery I suggest 2 of them again maybe not shipped at the same time but 2 would be nice. One can be given at the competitions so we have a fresh one to start with. Another thing I didn't like was having two sets of bumpers (colors) it just made everything complicated. The last thing I didn't appreciate was not having the actual game ball in the KOP only because the supplier ran out and shipping to Maui, Hawaii cost 50 some dollars which was ridiculous. On another note something I really enjoyed about the Hawaii regional compared to the others (Oregon, Arizona, Las Vegas) was the fact that during practice matches teams were not allowed to really substitute another team and go on the field to get practice and the fact that the volunteers were not treated as well as they were in Hawaii.:eek:

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Oh, I came up with two more!

The time required to replace the cRio is far too long. We had to replace ours twice this season and each time it required an extremely time consuming process between the updates and time required to download. I don't know if there's a solution to it, but I think it's worth looking into.

Can Someone Figure Out How To Make The Field Gates Stay On? It seemed that a robot knocked at least one field gate off in every other match. It's dangerous for a volunteer to reach into the field to retrieve the gate cover and lift the gate, and at the same time the gates and gate covers can cause serious damage to a robot.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I like the direct responses from this thread and am keeping certain ideas on a list so we can make some improvements for next year. I have to add a few comments that might give you some understanding...

Ball inflation. I received several complaints that balls were not inflated properly or that something must be different with the texture. I can tell you that balls were checked daily by the FTA but i think this was the problem in Atlanta. The fields were placed over the plastic squares used to cover the grass. These squares had a distinct dip in the middle and rise at the perimeter. For certain ball control designs, this was a variable that was not/could not be accounted for in design. It appeared to be a ball diameter issue when in fact I think it was a field substrate issue. I think that this also accounted for lower scores from robots that rolled balls. I know it was an issue in placing balls for auto periods.
Frame perimeter. I agree, it gave inspectors a pain all season. There is nothing worse for an inspector to have to tell a team everything is good except... and that exception will make their beautiful and functional robot ugly just to fix it.
Inspections. We are trying desperately to make inspections consistent and sometimes that means taking a hard stance. Pity passes should not be taking place but we will need a lot of team help in order to get a team compliant. We want everyone to play. In regionals, some inspectors are new or do not work on a team. If you see something, please point it out to the LRI. You are helping everyone when you do that. However, there is no penalties that can be assessed in these year's game for robot rules missed during inspections except safety. Items added by teams after inspection can be in violation and that is why all changes must be reinspected. Failures in robot structure and design that cause field damage are also subject to this review. It has become common for LRI's to now perform spot checks in queue and observe robots from the scorer's area to keep these issues to a minimum.
I would like to start a thread for inspection issues but I want to be sure it doesn't turn into something nasty. Please watch for it.
Al

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

At Championship, we were passed with only a cursory inspection.* The inspector, who will remain unnamed, spent at most sixty seconds looking at our robot, and barely glanced at the BOM. Our bumpers were on, and frame perimeter was not checked -- nor was bumper height. Nor was grounding on the camera or the CRio. Nor, nor, nor... A few cursory glances and the actual question, "Well, this all passed at your regional, right?" was just about it.**

...and yet other teams were missing games because of inspection issues.

So a negative that FIRST can do better with this year is to expand Wednesday beyond 6-9pm to allow for real inspections, and real time to work to get into compliance for teams that need it.

*I am certain we would have passed even with a very thorough inspection, as we were put through the ringer at FLR. (This is not a complaint. The inspector at FLR was very, very thorough, just as he should have been.)

**We were asked to move our on/off breaker switch, but we were given our sticker before we had done so. We did it anyway.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Pat,
Please PM me with details on this. I am guessing it took a little longer than sixty seconds and you may have had a relatively simple robot. A glance at the BOM to check for high ticket items and compare it to the robot was the instructions given to Champs inspectors to speed the process. The issuance of an inspection sticker for something you were told to move (and you agreed to move) would also have been appropriate. Your risk for not making the change would have been a zero point match if found in a spot check at the field.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Things I didn't quite like:

1. After a couple of rounds, I could tell that the balls were desperately wanting to be replaced. They should've been gladly obliged.

2. Seeding System. The system works, but that is only when the alliances are offensively oriented. A 4-0 win isn't rewarded as much as a 4-2 win. But I guess that's just the system, I just wish that wins took a little bit more priority.

3. Field on/off maneuvers. I'm not sure if this falls under the FMS, but I felt like this year, getting the robots on and off the field was a hassle. Especially at worlds when everyone game in/out of the same 3 gates.

4. Practice Fields. I don't know why, but this year more than ever, the practice field was impossible to get onto. I feel like maybe we should be doing one practice field per division. I mean, to expect that a team won't need practice field time because they should be ready is wrong. Everyone wanted, and neeed practice field time, and it was impossible to get any.

But I really liked this year. Just some minor annoyances made this year a little less entertaining, but I still enjoyed being a part of FRC 2010.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

i don’t know if anybody has mentioned it yet but in Denver we had a huge problem with the Plexiglass cover for the gate in and out of the field. our robot would try and get a ball and push it off and we got a penalty when we did the same thing in kc a few weeks earlier we didn’t get a penalty. also there was a corner on one side that every time we tried to push a ball in we got a penalty because the corner of or bumper pushed thru it by 1/8th of an inch. all of the field problems that we had this year were from recycling last years field in Denver. im not saying spend tons of money to build a new field every year but if your going to reuse one make sure its built to a 120lb robot with no mercy standard.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I really disliked the seeding score. I think that they had a good thought process behind it but it didn't work out well. A lot of our mentors were confused how we could be winning matches but not moving up the list. I prefer the older way much better.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

That has to be the biggest issue I have seen in FIRST for years. It's just not acceptable anymore. The issue coming from the Curie field is that the little metal loops that go around the pole were bent. This caused the lexan to extend into the field more then usual. I went around on day 2 and placed pieces of tape to the top of the bar. That solved a lot of the problems of a robot just skimming the gate and having it glide down the rail. I thought about having a channel for the lexan to sit in. SO that gets rid of the loops that get bent easily and does not allow the lexan to slide down the rails.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Velcro each end of the lexan and change the metal loops to a gate latch type of device? That should keep it from "bouncing off" when the rail is hit by a robot, and it should keep it from "sliding" in any direction when skimmed by a robot.

We're a bunch of engineers... we ought to be able to fix this.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

By my calculations, over the course of 3 days the practice fields were open for about 20 hours, giving 80 time slots accommodating up to 6 robots each. Shared over two divisions, that averages at just under 3 practice session per team. Of course the demand was huge on Thursday morning and varied throughout the competition. There were many teams that I never saw at the practice fields, and a few who were constantly using the fill line to sub in when scheduled teams did not show up.

Shipping 2 extra full fields to the Championships, putting them up, tearing them down, and staffing them would be a significant additional effort. Perhaps teams could also use Einstein for Thursday practice :)

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

To be blunt, the WET610N connection time is awful. That said, the WGA600N is no longer produced. Eventually (even with ebay and amazon), teams won't be able to get them. This year we looked and didn't find any. So, the WGA600N is not an option. To be honest, given how things change, I would expect that replacements are needed every year or two because the last set is no longer produced.