Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Add me to the list of people that want to see the Chairmans Videos and the WFFA and Deans List nominees. Or publish their names in the official event program. Or better yet, do both. Those people work hard, a few moments of fame!

Bumpers: I like the bumpers and after 6 years we now have bumper design and assembly down to a science. They are the same size, they mount / dismount in < 2 mins, etc. (We are thinking of having a three day class in Bermuda to teach these valuable skills, contact me off list if you want to go :rolleyes: ) We buy pool noodles during the summer and stock them up. After three years it's a good bet we will need them next year.

We luck out because our school colors are blue/gold so we do gold numbers on the blue bumpers and it looks fine for our demo bots. But I feel for the teams that have massive color schemes like 1511 Red/Black camo and Moe's "Moe Green" not being able to have the bumpers match.

For VRC we have these little license plates that go on the robot. In FRC we could get 8 12" long (4 red, 4 blue) iron on fabric strips in the correct "FIRST Red and FIRST blue" colors with the team numbers in "approved contrasting colors" of the "required height and brush stroke" in the KoP. Make bumpers with your custom colors / design, iron on the numbers and you are good to go.

After this many years we should have bumpers down to a science. And there are more "mature" teams than rookies so we should be able to share the knowledge.

Bumpers save robot lives, but also I'm happier doing a demo in our sponsors space knowing I'm unlikely to leave huge gouges in their office walls.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Well, I can tell you that teams got on more than they were alloted. Like, even if we assume that there were twenty hours of practice time slots. Then three teams on per division, and hour long slots were fitted into four, 15 minute slots. So that's 20 * 4 * 3 = 240. So that's 240 slots with each team getting roughly 3?

Well, the practice fields aren't the smoothest run operations. For some reason, the coordinators are more worried about having all of the robots on the fields and running the fields in a "match" format rather than a practice field format.

Regardless, I think everyone can agree that the practice fields are hard to get. And I don't know what exactly FIRST can do, but something might be better than nothing.


Another thing that I noticed was that no matter how much we yelled "ROBOT", people would not move. One time, we were walking toward a mass of people, Yelling "Robot", and they would not move. It wasn't until I was almost right at them that they jumped back with surprise. I'm not going for the safety award, I'm just trying to get my robot from the pit to the field without hurting anyone.

- Sunny

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I used the wrong language there. G37c says that incidental contact will not be penalized, but that in general contact out the bumper zone is not acceptable, and will be penalized -- red carded if egregious. It never was.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Dean's List. I agree with everyone about Dean's List. Dean couldn't possibly wonder why he didn't receive as many submissions as he had expected if he announced his idea a week before the deadline was set for the nominations.

Safety Award. It's quite hard to try and explain to pit scouters what exactly your robot does when every other minute you hear, "ROBOT COMING THROUGH!" yes, that call is helpful if there are people clearly in the way, but a simple "excuse me, robot coming through!" would suffice if someone was in the way. So the Safety Award should be judged differently in my opinion, as certain behaviors are certainly not safe.

The DOGMA System. Oh my oh my, this caused such a panic when one of our balls hadn't been returned in our second match in the finals at the New Jersey Regional. We received something like 72 penalty points for not returning a ball to the field, when it had just fallen off the ball return before passing through the photogate. That definitely jeopardized our chances of winning, as each alliance had won one match each, but we managed to be more careful in the third and final match :rolleyes:

Camera Operators. I noticed there were a lot of zoom shots and close-ups, but I prefer a nice view of the entire field rather than seeing the focus on one or two robots at a time.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I felt like the DOGMA system caused more faulty penalties than legitimate penalties. Not only was it the cause of some 80+ point penalties, but the Alliance cannot do anything about it. It is even possible that an Alliance could be doomed before Autonomous even finishes, just because someone put the ball onto the field rather than giving it back to the human player. I would suggest that next time, they make it impossible for the ball to fall off before the photogate, or even have an override to avoid it.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Did anybody else have zero volts reading on the classmate before the match, but when the match started, the robot worked just fine?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I must say that what I've heard about the Israeli regional is simply pathetic. Towers there weren't built per the legal dimensions - making functional hangers dysfunctional - bumps weren't the right size - semis were decided by a coin flip :facepalm: - etc. The soccer balls used there weren't even the specified soccer ball (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/img...40212523_l.jpg) - they were Nike soccer balls donated by a team (at least that's what I heard). Here's a thread, written by an Israeli team mentor, that details just some of the many problems there: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=84605.

My personal complaint is that FIRST personnel seem not to abide by 'Gracious Professionalism' when it comes to possible mistakes on their part; their motto for such occasions seems to be "It has never been FIRST's fault, it is not FIRST's fault, and it cannot be FIRST's fault. End of story." I don't mean to come across so harsh, but...

At the New York regional - during an elimination match, but I'm not sure which - the field system had to be rebooted. Prior to doing so, we were instructed to close the lid on our Classmate. However, as many people discovered throughout the season, letting your Classmate start sleeping whilst the Cypress is connected leads to the Classmate not recognizing the connection to the Cypress, and consequently a person not being able to use any switches wired through the Cypress - in other words, letting your Classmate sleep while it's connected to the OI has the potential to kill everything on your OI that is not a joystick/controller. When the referees instructed us to close the lid, we immediately pointed out this glitch, and they didn't retract the instruction; we were, however, allowed to leave our Classmate open.

One of our batteries had also been wired improperly - the terminals had been reversed, inverting the current - and this (probably) caused us to fry our analog breakout. We quickly replaced it, and when we found an opportunity to, we talked to the NI representative about it. Much to our dismay, we found out that a third-party manufacturer is licensed to produce the analog breakout, and consequently, we were unable to definitively determine the root of the problem in our fried breakout (although reviewing the circuit map of the breakout, we did find that the most probable cause was the frying of the 5v power supply on it, since that had visible internal damage). It wasn't a problem of much importance, but it would have been nice if there was someone that we could actually talk to about what the problem and its cause was.

At the Hartford regionals, we had field connection issues - I only found out during quarters, since I was in the pits the majority of the time - and it turned out that one of the driver stations on our half of the field had been inconsistent for a while, and that totally messed up our play. We ended up holding our own for a few matches in the quarters, with just one or two active robots (an alliance member's bridge connection had come loose) - and if not for bad ref calls, in conjunction with the field problems, we definitely would have made it to semis.

At Nationals, we lost communication during one match because a volunteer insisted on untethering our robot from the practice field and we didn't check to make sure that he plugged the radio (wireless bridge) back into the cRIO properly. We came out of that match panicking, and then we see the loose wire. I mean, honestly.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I did not actually realize this was a problem. Admittedly, I'm not much of an electronics person and I'm always scared to death to touch that thing because it's so costly, but I know that we killed one at SVR (:ahh: $5000 we don't have anymore) and got it replaced before our next match... I'll talk to our programmer about that because we just got it out, got a replacement in, and kept playing.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

There were a number of teams at Championship that saw 0.00V battery readings, yet had their robots function. The primary causes were: not having the Analog Module installed in slot #1 of the cRIO, not having the appropriate jumper installed on the analog breakout board, or a bad connection between the analog breakout board and the PDU. In all cases, the lack of a correct battery voltage reading did not affect the robot performance.

Even though its an inspection item, the battery voltage reading is just a diagnostic tool. Some teams having robot issues on the field were informed by the FTA (or FTAA) after a match that their battery voltage was dropping to very low values (<8V). Bad batteries can cause radio or cRIO resets, which result in loss of communications on the field. Not a good thing...

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Perhaps it's the frequency in which so many teams were yelling "ROBOT!" when there was no one even close by, that caused everyone else to become annoyed and ignorant of teams actually trying to clear their way through. For next year, howabout we have everyone try leaving their pit area a little earlier, and taking their time to walk with everyone else, instead of trying to blast through/past them all.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Really? If this is true, you really need to look harder at the resources available to you.

NI is RMAing cRIO's free of charge. Purchasing a new cRIO costs $750 for the first one per year, and $1500 afterwards.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Tyler,
Are you talking about the robot 12 volt display on the Classmate or the voltage on the Classmate battery?

The 12 volts from Module 1 is used by the Crio to determine if the robot battery level is getting too low. The Crio power supply on the PD drops out at 4.5 volts. So knowing this fact, the designers added a safety margin of 1 volt to the Crio firmware. The Crio disables all output when the battery falls to 5.5 volts. Without the voltage monitor, it is possible for odd behavior from your robot during these low battery conditions.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

LOL. I should have known not to use categorical language on a forum full of engineers and aspiring engineers.

By "never" in this case I mean "never at FLR", as that was the only Overdrive event we attended. :P

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Does anybody else wonder why after three or four years, the field still cannot accurately count scoring devices without being overloaded?