2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

What could have FIRST done better this year?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

NO GAME OBJECT IN THE KIT OF PARTS!

FIRST never do this to us again! The surface finish on the balls was so specific at driving the design of ball handling mechanisms and you screwed it up again by chosing something we couldn't get and not warning the manufacturer to stock up because a huge influx of orders would be coming.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Truthfully? As far the game goes, my only REAL complaint was the DOGMA system. Ok idea, bad implementation. Should have been 1 point penalty once per ball, not repeated penalties.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Peter and Tom just addressed #1 and #2 on my list.

I would like to see a stronger incentive for using the camera (and autonomous mode in general).

The Classmate is at best a work in progress. Between Windows startup times and power management woes, battery life, USB enumeration issues, powering the USB ports, cheapo Ethernet ports, and the tedium of "FMS Locked" and E-stop, I think we can do a lot better.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

This wasn't completely FIRST's problem, but the discontinuation of the WGA bridges and their replacement with the WET bridges was a bit of a problem that could have been avoided by some more testing on FIRST's part to make sure there weren't any major problems with it (long connection times, disconnecting WGA bridges, etc.)

EDIT: agreement with most of the stuff with the classmate on the above post

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Add in the impossibility of getting replacement parts like batteries for the classmate to that list.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The inspectors
 

Ok first of all i'm going to say i appreciate all the volunteers that helped out with FIRST FRC robotics this year and every year, but i think that FIRST needs to have a code of conduct for when it comes to inspecting a teams robot. For example having to ask to move your robot at ANY and EVERY time they wish to do so, ect. the reason i say that is because this year when we went to Atlanta we missed our very first match because during our teams inspection the inspector moved our robot while it was off while this doesn't seem like a problem it is because our team decided to use CAN this year and when he moved our robot he sent reverse current into our jaguars thus completely ruining functionality of 3 of our jaguars it was to bad that the only thing the texas instruments guy could do for us was give us three new jaguars(after 30min. of trying to fix them. on top of the at least 1 hour inspection) and after that things just went down hill for our team.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I didn't like the many field problems experienced at the competitions. Sometimes matches get delayed for 10-20 minutes because of these problems. The Kettering District competition lasted until 7:00PM because of the many field issues that needed to be worked on. I know the system had to be rebooted a few times, but each of those reboots took up to a half hour each! FIRST or National Instruments needs to find a way to make problems like these quicker to solve and fix to make things run smoother.
I also didn't like how it is hard to figure whether or not it is a field or a robot problem when a robot doesn't run during a match. There needs to be a system in place that determines functionality of both the field and the robot to better determine where the problem is coming from.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I didn't like that we have to reuse control systems from a previous year. *thinks about the pile of robot skeletons in the closet*

I didn't like the no-bonus autonomous.

I didn't like the low scoring matches.

I didn't like how the game wasn't conducive to defense.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I dont like the seeding system. Although, next year, with a new game, I hope for a new seeding system more like elims.

EDIT: Suspension. With only about 5 total in the season, it was a completely failed game mechanic.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

It looked to me like some robots at the championships had issues (weight, electrical, pneumatic) that needed to be fixed but passed inspection at the regionals. I don't think they're doing teams a favor by letting them through regionals this way. Maybe they can issue conditional inspection approvals to let teams compete but all issues need to be corrected before the eliminations. That way teams earning their way to Altanta would be confident they are good to go.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The inspectors
 

We've moved our robot with the power off many times without any damage to our Jaguars (and yes, we were using CAN). Now, it's possible that there was some sort of electro-static discharge (ESD) event that propagated through the CAN bus that caused multiple Jaguar failures. I defer to Al Skierkiewicz (CMP Lead Robot Inspector, and VERY familiar with the robot control system electronics) as to whether back-EMF could induce such a problem.

As far as robot inspector code-of-conduct goes, the inspectors at CMP were presented with a huge challenge: get 340+ robots inspected in less time than what is allotted for most regional events. If your inspector seemed a bit rushed, it's because we all were. If you felt uncomfortable moving your robot, you should have said so. I will only touch a robot when looking for sharp edges, tracing wires, or inspecting bumpers. If someone asks me to help support their robot, hold a component, or move a mechanism, I'll do it because I trust the team will not ask me to do something that is unsafe. No inspector would ever want to damage a team's robot. We all want to see everyone compete safely and within the rules.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

A picture paints a thousand words. Here are two pictures that express my biggest negative this year.

There was a lot of this........




shortly followed by a whole lot more of this........



Hurry up and wait....and wait....and wait.......


Maybe we can have custom built for FIRST WiFi next season.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Sort of a follow up to the DOGMA issue before. It was a real problem when a ball would fall off the ball-return track (before passing through the counter) and a reset-volunteer would pick it up and place it back in the mid field (A rare occasion, but I still saw this happen more than once). This obviously potentially would ruin a match for the alliance. So my suggestion would be better volunteer training for those special cases as described.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I completely agree with you. There were several inspection "faults" that should have been caught and corrected at the regionals. These problems were identified and corrected at CMP at the cost of considerable stress to the teams and the inspectors.

I also don't think teams should be held off the field at regionals for minor discrepancies, but the teams should be forced to correct such problems before the elimination rounds. The pre-elimination round weight check should indeed include a check for any conditional "passes" and verification that the problem(s) are resolved.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Perhaps a DOGMA override switch would work. If there is obviously no hoarding of balls and the system has somehow messed up with scoring (electronic or mechanical) the refs should be able to cancel the DOGMA counter (or any equivalent for future years). It wouldn't totally stop the penalties, but losing 2 or 3 points and then a manual cancelation of DOGMA is much better than a failed system "dogma'ing you to death"

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Training for the camera operators for Championships. Watching the web casts was a pain because the field side camera men would zoom in on the drivers for 5-15 second periods during the match. They would do the same to individual robots during the match as well, so it was hard to have any idea of how the match was going besides watching the real-time scoring.

I understand the people sitting in the stands can see most everything, and the close ups can be nice for them, but for those watching at home, we rarely got to see our teams in action because of all the close ups.

I suggest that a majority of each match be a zoomed out view of the entire field, while a smaller percentage of time is dedicated to zooming in on a particular robot or drive team.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

What about a Picture-in-Picture system for the scoreboard? Almost any decent video mixer should be able to do it (might require a 2nd board though since match video is green-screened onto the score display) The background shows an overview of the entire field, and close-ups are PIP'd into it.

I think this is only needed for Champs (and possibly MSC) since those get the most webcast views since there are so many people who want to go but can't. A regular regional with it's lower budget shouldn't have to go for the extra equipment

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I agree that a no bonus autonomous period was a big problem. Teams that work hard to write great autonomous code should get some benefit for it. I was upset to see so few autonomous codes being played this year, many robots would stand still then clear their zone.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

better regional scheduling- usually we have a better turnout at BMR, but since midwest was the same week, it was a hard choice for many teams.

maybe they need a rule that says no two regionals __ miles away can be the same week (michigan districts are an exeption).

also, the bumpers were FAIL. they were too high, which caused many robots to tip way too easy. also, the colors took away from the personality of the robot. also, most robots had numbers not visible form far away, which made scouting a nightmare.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The rules on minor protrusions were a bit much this year. Next year I believe that minor protrusions from the frame perimeter should be allowed both inside and outside of the bumper zone as long as they do not pose an entanglement hazard.

The automated system that handled dogma was a bit strange. On at least one occasion I saw an alliance get a dogma penalty while there were no balls in the goals or in the alliance station. Perhaps this was due to a careless human player, but regardless, this should not decide a match.

The classmates need a bit more work, and we need to find a supplier for both replacement classmates and batteries. The IO interface is glitchy at best, and the whole USB power issue shouldn't have happened.

The Field Wifi system could use more refinement, though I will say it is at least 10 times better than it was last year.

Regional inspections should be a bit more harsh especially in earlier Regionals. We made it to the Championship with two bolt heads slightly outside of our frame perimeter that weren't caught at either of our earlier Regionals... I'd move to make the rules a bit more lax, or have the inspectors go through the robots a bit more thoroughly.

(I'll probably come up with a few more)

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The safety award.

I feel the original intent of the award has been lost, and now has just become a competition for who can yell "ROBOT!" the loudest while walking through the pits.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Ok, I'll come out and say it. The biggest negative I have for 2010 is... The Control System.

Netbook boot times were slow but tolerable.

Issues with the PSOC boards not working were irritating but there were other options.

The single biggest cause of alarm for me involves the disable switch. They were flimsy, when someone is killing an out of control robot they should NOT have to worry about breaking the disable switch. Additionally, at one point in time we tried to disable the robot... I say tried because it never disabled. The netbook was so slow that it took longer to recognize the disable switch had been pressed than it took for someone to reach in and kill power to the robot. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. No, it isn't a pet peeve. It isn't a bother. It is a safety hazard. When I hit disable there is a reason I hit disable and it $@#$@#$@#$@# better kill that robot.

There are too many parts to this control system. You have a netbook, a router, a wireless bridge, a CRIO, a digital sidecar, a handful of breakout boards, a PD board... when you can't get a speed controller to work what is it? Is it your code? Is it that your comms are down? Is it that your joystick is busted? Is it a breakout board? Is everything getting enough power? Is it your wiring? Is it a bad ESC? Who do I call for support? My question mark key just stopped working... I know FIRST really likes their suppliers, I appreciate everything they do, but we REALLY need to cut the number of points of failure down. Look at the IFI system, single vendor solution. If something broke I knew who to call. Simplifying would cut weight, costs, and energy requirements. Why is the system so complex?

Or waste the most paper putting up flyers... I always wonder, do the teams that put them up take them down too? Do they recycle them? Or waste the most of my time by explaining to me how to use MY safety equipment... or where the fire exits are... I could go on with all the common sense things these teams insisted on wasting my time telling me. Instead of focusing on telling me how to be safe focus on making your team safe and let me worry about my team. Although, having the UL guys there is pretty freaking cool. I loved talking to them at Kettering.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Although I have listened to the explanations I still feel there were enormous opportunities lost by the last minute implementation of the Dean's List. Lots of deserving students were left behind. A+ for intent. Failing grade for execution.
That said, congrats to all the students nominated and selected to be honored.

There should be a flood of nominations next year. What a good problem to have.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

and hang safety poster anywhere and everywhere....

When I think of the Safety Award I think of what team 250 did last year in the Philadelphia regional to win it. They actually took care of a potentially dangerous situation with a leaking battery that was so textbook they should have filmed it so other teams can see how it's done just in case such a situation arises again.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I agree. In one of our CMP quarterfinals matches, the camera operator focused on the far zone, while we scored seven or eight balls in the near zone.
There was also issues with the field video screen, at least the one on Curie. It would occasionally turn off, or turn green, or have green bars all over. It was extremely annoying waiting for the screen to turn on so you could see whether you'd just won or lost the match.

Also, I'd really like to see an award that recognizes scouting in some way, or recognizes an innovation in scouting. Scouting is a huge part of the competition, and it isn't recognized at all.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The inspectors
 

Hi, I'm the TI guy who was in the pits with 2865. We did swap out a bunch of jags, but in the end it was two CAN cables that were open circuit (that we eventually found with a multimeter). I've got the old jags here and we'll be taking a look at them to confirm - but I'm pretty sure they're OK. Certainly moving the robot shouldn't damage the Jaguars - we do some very demanding tests for that. Really sorry to hear though that it didn't work out for 2865.

-- Jon

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

+10 - this award is a pet peeve of mine.

We've now placed 2nd for the safety award 3 times. At the Michigan State Championships, we collected over 50 safety tokens.

Nearly every single one of those were given to us because we:

#1 Had a corner pit at the biggest intersections in the venue
#2 Had it clean and organized

The safety award needs to be a judged award where they discuss aspects of YOUR robot that were unsafe and what you've done to protect yourself. I'd wager we'd see major improvements in gear guarding, chain guarding, labeling, wiring, and many of the other 'major' culprits. For instance, how many teams have a foot-actuated wheel lock to prevent the cart from being moved unintentionally? How about a safety token for each team that shows up with their main breaker and pneumatic valve already pre-labeled?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The inspectors
 

Finding the root cause is always a really good thing! Without it, there is always a bit of assumption and finger pointing that may or may not be substantiated. It's good to know it wasn't the Jag's.

Whenever you have a "bussed" environment, a failure in the buss can have variety of symptoms, some obvious, some not so obvious.

This also re-enforces the need to have quality cable connections and well built cables. Oh, and BTW, having a decent cable continuity tester is invaluable, and cheap too!

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Autonomous was huge this year. What do you mean by "no bonus"?

Things negative about this year:

Suspension probably should have been worth more points if the GDC wanted us to do it. The single extra point it's worth convinces me that they wanted us to analyze and determine that suspension indeed wasn't worth it. It would have been cool to see though.

There simply should not have been so many field connection issues. My team shouldn't have to bring their unplugged router with them to a match in order to prove that the robot wasn't trying to connect to it. (Apparently, despite the custom encryption, field crews at WPI claimed my team's robot was connected to our own router in the pits, which remained unplugged throughout the event) It seemed like every other match there was that one, two, or three robots that took several minutes to get to work, and the fact that more than one match was decided for my team by whether or not field personnel felt like spending the 10 minutes it takes to make a robot work or not is stupid. One match we didn't move. Another match, our partner that we desperately needed to try and upset 1124 in CT quals didn't move and they made them take the robot off the field (side note: i wish they let us move that robot in front of the opponent's goal instead of walking it off). If you're paying ~$500 a match, this kind of thing isn't acceptable.

To drive home my point... it happened on Einstein! 294's sync issues, while it made me hear more of Dave Verbugge's awesome speech, are something that just shouldn't happen.

The Safety Award should be awarded to the safest teams, not the most obnoxious. Just imagine if the GP award was given out the way the Safety award is...

Some method of ensuring judges give each team a minimum amount of time to talk to them would be nice. Say, 10 minutes per team Friday morning? Judges do go by every team's pit, but 90 seconds isn't enough to decide whether or not a team should get an award. Not that I'm bitter...

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The fact that we received 89 penalities in one match due to DOGMAR explains most of my complaints.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

This post says it all!
And disagree with the so-called no bonus of autonomous. Starving an opposing alliance and scoring points was absolutely a difference maker in matches at CMP.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The Game: Having a week one regional with this game was horrific. Penalties coming out the ying-yang and many of them, after the next Team Update, never would have been called. A lot of week1 teams got hosed by bad calls and bad rules.

The Wireless Bridge: Throw the WET610N away. It is a piece of garbage. It is slow to connect, impossible to configure, and a horrible piece of hardware to use in a game where seconds count. Six minutes a match? You wait almost a minute for the darn thing to even connect. Solutions: www.ebay.com or www.amazon.com. Our WGA600N connects in about 6 seconds, every time, no matter what the order we plug stuff in.

The Safety Award: The mechanic is *useless*. The token system is ridiculous. You have UL safety judges, a whole gaggle of them. Make Safety Judging part of Robot Inspection.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The inspectors
 

In no particular order:

The ranking system. When a Championship contender decides it's in its best interest from the seeding standpoint to take a 29-0 dive (no matter how spectacular it was to watch the scoreboard climb), what does that say?

Also, while the five-point win bonus made for a great improvement in the system after week 1, how will the GDC be able to calibrate that bonus in future years with wildly different scoring? Unless you throw those first-week events under the bus, it seems nearly impossible.

Make the coopertition score the first tiebreaker after WLT record, though, and I'm fine.

The control system. My position has been clear on the reuse of control system components (I'd rather not), but I'll grit my teeth and do it. All I ask is for this system to work reliably, especially on the field. I was partially relieved to hear of no new announcements in Atlanta for the control system--now please, beat the hell out of it with the FMS this off-season!

Bumpers. I miss them being optional. I miss them being colored as we desire, if applicable. I miss being able to style our numbers where and as we desire, within the bounds of the applicable rules. I would not miss seeing a dozen or so teams at Bayou just outside the venue painting their bumpers to get their numbers on (and, generally, getting less-than-stellar results in the process).

Assuming that FIRST finds the 2010-spec bumper rules desirable, though, how about this: Give us 12" in the middle of each bumper to style as we see fit, provided that it includes the 4" numbers and that the background isn't the other color (e.g. no blue backgrounds on the red bumpers). Doing so would allow much better opportunities to brand the robots with more familiar elements (sponsor logos, slogans, pigs on rockets) to aid recognition while doing little to diminish recognition of alliance color.

No game ball in the kit of parts. See above.

Dean's List timing. See every other post about it. Wonderful intent, awful announcement timing. We'll give it a go in 2011.

------------------------------------

Aside: I hope everyone posting in this thread will take the time to post in the Positives thread as well.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

My primary suggestion for how things can be done better is the same every year: If something is illegal, and will garner a penalty, it should be penalized *every time*, consistently, and without even the tiniest regard to whether or not it will make the game 0-0...

From contact outside the bumper zone (which was almost never called during Overdrive, much to my chagrin given our robot design) to balls 3+" inside the frame perimeter (which was properly called week one, and then modified afterward for reasons I do not agree with), teams should have very clear expectations for how their robot should be designed so as to minimize penalties.

Defining situations that incur penalties and then not penalizing them (to the best of the refs' abilities, of course) just simply should not be done. If it's a penalty, then students should design their robots not to incur that penalty -- and if they don't, then they should learn a little something about game play and design constraints, just like every other aspect of the game.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

+1

It's nice to see the kids run and grab the controls. But to focus on them for the next 10-15 seconds? If that's the primary target, what about the 5 other driver teams on the field?

And during the bonus period, how about 'zooming out' in order to see both alliances attempting to hang? I think I may have a caught a match or two where two robots were attempting to hang on the same tower, but the video feed concentrated on only one robot.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I already posted in this thread, but I dislike the next subject so much that I'll make another post.

BUMPERS.

I've never really known a game in the Pre-Bumper Era except for triple play, and I feel that bumpers a good thing for FRC because they do lessen some impacts and the amount of damage taken by a robot due to defense. Any robot I build from this point forward will have bumpers whether they are mandatory or not.

BUT, I hated the mandatory bumper colors and marking restrictions this year. Also, I don't think that bumpers should be mandatory, or at least the rules should be relaxed so they aren't such a design restriction. I can understand what FIRST was trying to do with the red and blue bumpers this year, but many teams used bumpers in previous years to help in decorating their robot and to carry their team image through their machine.

Personally, I think that FIRST should find another way to differentiate one alliance from the other that isn't bumper colors. IMO, I'm a huge fan of the Giant Spinning light used in games pre-2005.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I assume you are talking about G46. My team, as well was saddened to heard that it was abolished, as we had built our robot to specifically not get balls under it, by having tank treads. It gave us a competitive advantage that other teams didn't have when they rode over balls. In the entire FLR, we did not get a single ball penetration violation. However, if the same rule was in place at other regionals, then we may have seeded even higher than we did.

I do understand that it was the GDC's intent, though, and it made it a more fun game to watch, without the MC constantly yelling BALL PENETRATION VIOLATION, like they did at FLR :P

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Our Overdrive robot extended outside our bumper zone a maximum of 4", and then only while acquiring the ball, so that we would not incur incidental contact penalties. Watching the games and counting actual incidental contact from various trackball manipulators, I think *every single match* would have been a 0-0 tie if they were calling it properly...

...which means that teams are so used to penalties not being called for certain rules that they don't even worry about them... So why have them?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I'm not going to take long here, so I'll just echo the points mentioned in this thread that I agree with:

Control System. It's awful. I'm grateful that teams have the chance to work with some pretty cool equipment, but the Classmate should be all but scrapped, the FMS clearly hates mixing routers, and don't get me started on the cRio reboot times.

Dean's List. While my team never had the resources to focus on award-writing, I feel that the teams who do were slighted greatly by what can only be summed up as bad timing.

Inspections. That protruding bolt head deal caused us a match and about a half-hour of work over a half-inch of length. The sad part is, nothing would have gotten entangled anyway, since the bumpers extended much farther than the 1/4" each bolt added.

CMP cameras. I loved the overhead boom shots that they had. That doesn't make up for missing a shot of two/three robots hanging on the same tower. And what are they focusing on during this time? The drivers, a robot that's failing at attempting to score a ball repeatedly, the crowd, the concrete floor, the bird on the ceiling....

There are 5 weeks of regionals before Championships. I know they're a professional TV crew with busy schedules, but PLEASE make sure they attend one or two regionals as spectators to get a sense of what's important for that year's game. It's hard to explain to my boss or family why the crowd is going beserk while we're watching a flipped robot for 20-seconds.

Bumpers. Ditto to everyone in the thread.

Sound system (Buckeye-specific). OK, we go from way too loud (as in pants were shaking) last year, to barely audible this year? Is this some kind of joke, or did they not know how low the levels were this year? The music, during dance breaks, was alright. But my main gripe was with the voices. The MC went so silent at times that you could hear a pin drop from the pits. The crowd didn't seem to be as into the competition as previous years (though that's not entirely a sound problem, louder music can help).

Teams in queue lines were definitely grateful for not having 5-foot speakers/woofers next to them this season, though. I approve of that. :)

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The control system as mentioned before, I am just echoing previous comments.

The old IFI controller, I brought it home as a sophomore in high school (2001), plugged it in, read the couple of pages of instructions that were available online and it worked without any problems. Programming involved one small program and one resource file.
Now I need multiple files, multiple programs, several DVD's worth of information, then after I install of of that (which takes an ungodly amount of time and restarts to do) I then had to update several different things, with several different files. It was frustrating to me as a mentor, to our kids it was just impossible. (The caveat here is that I'm the mechanical mentor, but our programmer who really knows his stuff had a horrible time with it as well.)
There was a whole lot of time wasted waiting to see if it would come back on, whether it was rebooting, resyncing the router, changing settings. Way to much wasted time troubleshooting a system that should be plug and play.

The Scoring System
I sat in the stands and tried to explain to parents how the loosing team received more points then the winning team, when asked why, I honestly couldn't explain that part to them. (This was both before and after the update) It never makes sense to me how the scoring system works, FIRST has tried this several times, in my opinion it just doesn't work. It is supposed to be a competition. Then add the fact that the scoring system changed after the first week, that doesn't make sense to me, especially since people pointed out the flaws in the scoring system almost immediately after it was posted in the rooms.

Safety Award
I agree completely and 100% with the award for being the most obnoxious / the meaningless safety tokens.

I just think that they are trying to make it more complicated year after year, when it should really stay the same. FIRST is great at inspiring young minds. I know that a whole bunch of kids on my team LOVE to work with this stuff. They would love it regardless of how crazy complicated the control system was, or how complicated the game is, or even whether they win or lose (because no matter how the scoring system works, the same number of teams still win and the same number still lose regardless of how the points are awarded)

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I believe it would then be retitled the "Kill Them With Kindness" Award.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Dark numbers on the bumpers - red and blue. Don't use dark colors. Couldn't see the dark numbers on the webcast.

I'm posting the red and blue bumpers and light colored numbers in the positive thread. They were AWEsome.

Ok, back to the negatives...

Jane

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

#1 we did not pay thousands of dollars to be a field beta tester, have your field issues worked out BEFORE Week 1

#2 if you are going to have all these events, please make sure each one is staffed with competent referees, or at least ones that are wrong but consistent

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

It's hard to do that when FIRST themselves aren't even consistent....

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

2 problems:

1. Inflation of game pieces. They gave us a specific psi in the manual, so why didn't they stick to that? This gave us nightmares with tuning autonomous, because the flat vs. inflated balls were kicking drastically different distances. Couldn't they have taken 12 balls, pumped them up correctly, and rotated them every 5 matches to make sure they were kept inflated?

2. The 1/4 - 1in platform under the bump. It caused so many carrying penalties. Why couldn't they have extended the wood all the way to the walls, to make an even playing field?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

This was a big problem for everyone in Dallas. Day one, the refs called everything under the sun. Day two, no penalties are being called to the extent that I hear mentors telling their teams "they aren't calling penalties anymore". not good.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Control System, DOGMA penalties, and the rivet/bolt heads outside of frame perimeter are my biggest. Starting from the bottom:

DOGMA penalties: During QF1 at Archimedes, our HP placed a ball on the ball return but it did not roll. He then got another ball (We scored like 3 at once), saw the other ball was stuck, and pushed it with the second ball. Both went through together, but the sensor saw them as one. We got 11 DOGMA penalties for that. (we eventually had them removed as a ref saw the mistake, but we had to talk to the scoring table about that for quite a long time)

Stuff outside frame perimeter: We almost failed inspection at Troy and MSC because of four rivet heads below the frame perimeter. A layer of velcro to bump out the frame perimeter saved us.

Control system stuff: This is going to be a long list. A really, really long list.

1. Cypress board. Talking to Greg McKaskle at CMP, he told me that around 1 in 10 cold boots the Classmate will fail to find the Cypress board and the only solution is to reboot. Shortly after teams alerted NI of this problem they found the bug involving communication with the Cypress driver, went to fix it, but FIRST would not let them roll out an update to Driver Station because it did not affect enough teams to make all teams update Driver Station.

2. FMS lock. Just plain annoying. What more do I have to say?

3. Boot times. The cRio itself can boot the PowerPC processor, load the FPGA, drop the FPGA, load it again, and launch the user code in like 5 seconds (it has to initialize the FPGA twice for some calibration things says Greg). Then, the FRC comm code has to timeout on stuff and wait for stuff all in the same thread (so it can't continue loading while it times out on stuff). THEN, the bootloader runs in a lower priority thread then the user code (sometimes preventing downloads if CPU loads are high) an can't be run until the user code is running (so you can't download while its initializing).

4. Build and Download times: This is a bug in LV RT. It is not designed for downloading and compiling of codes in such a time crunch, and is not optimized to store precompiled versions of files. Thus, every time it builds, it must rebuild the entire WPI library. Then it must re-download the entire WPI library. Almost none of the build or download time is team code. If I want to change an autonomous variable, I have to wait like 5 minutes before I can run it again if I have to do a full build and download. Back in the days of the IFI processor, I could have the code build in 6 seconds and downloaded with IFI loader in 10 seconds, then reboot and wait another 200ms for tethered comm (5s radio). This does leave us with a filesystem for storing CSV files, but that only allows a sequence of events, not calculations or dynamic re-generation of paths. Many teams have asked me during competition if I have had an issue where I can't download code, I have told all of them to use the No App switch as a workaround and to look for fast loops in their code. I can't name off all the teams that have asked me this.

5. GDC stop giving us camera tasks. (Dave, the cRio just can't do vision tracking effectively). In 2009 and 2010, the GDC challenged us to use the cRio to process images of reflective targets using the Ethernet camera and the cRio. In 2006 and 2007, the GDC gave us lighted targets and a co-processor/camera module. The old system acted independently of the main processor, so any vision delays would not carry over into control lag. Now, vision delays carry over into control lag. We did not use the camera in either 2009 or 2010 specifically because if F'd with timing enough to cause PID loops to freak out. (we did, however, use the camera dashboard this year, and that worked well).

6. Radio things: The power connection on the radio is not robust enough to handle competition by itself. This is fixed with silicone or duct tape, but still, its going to come loose if you don't glue/tape it in. Same, to a lesser extent, with the Ethernet connection to the radio.

7. Breakout boards: More points of failure. While they will never have the fully integrated solution that IFI provided us with this control system, the best they could do would be to create custom modules for the cRio that provide us with specific I/O and let us mix/match. For example, an 8-AI board that has 3-pin headers that we like, or an GPIO module that has the same 3-pin headers, or a PWM module, or a "standard module" that was required, things like battery voltage, RSC, etc. or a driver module for pneumatics (this one could also include Spike outputs). They should probably be powered off the cRio's internal supply (this would remove all that wiring to WAGO's and such, but I would live with the WAGO inputs if I didn't have the breakout boards and cRio modules and 37pin cables and DSC's. Also, a solid bolt connection would be a nice addition to the spring clips of now (we have actually had modules fall out of the cRio going over bumps, so we glued them all in, but they need a more robust connection)

8. PD board and WAGO connections: I like the overall idea of the PD board, but my biggest concern is the WAGO connections. It's not the connections themselves that bug me, but having to reach a screwdriver into the side of the module and having room to move it around to open up the connection is something I prefer not to do (its quite impossible on our 2009 robot, and partially impossible on this years bot). The 2005 integrated PD board had quick-connects from the top, a much better connection design then the WAGO's of now.

I could give lots of positives to go with the negatives, but this is a negative thread, isn't it.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I have a negative. It directly follows from the above post. While this is specifically directed at the above poster, I'm more annoyed about the general stuff (below the direct response) than missing something that was partially buried in a paragraph in an area that teams don't generally like to read unless they're building their field. This is not intended to be a specific attack on anyone, but a general "Wake UP!" call for next year.

Once again, there are a number of teams that did not read the full Manual and thereby missed out on some critical rules and dimensions.

The fact that there was a 1/2" bump was called out in both Section 6.2.3, sentences 5-7, and Field Drawings GE-10002 and GE-10003 (bump and tower plates, respectively). It was there on Day 1, it was there the last day of Championship, it was never changed. They did tell you.

There are teams that didn't have their relief valves on the compressor (not the storage tank, a hard pipe to the compressor, etc.) as required by the rules when they showed up for inspection. There was a team (admittedly, a rookie team) that showed up with what would have been an active mechanism above the bumper zone, before being reminded by a veteran team that that was not legal. Another team had neither relief valve nor vent valve prior to inspection. The list goes on, and I'm sure that other inspectors could tell you more horror stories about illegal teams from this year. Let alone last year and the year before...

While those teams do eventually fix their robots to be in compliance, it takes a lot of time that neither the teams nor the inspectors necessarily have.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I've always been disappointed with the video feeds. They are designed to be supplements for people watching from the stands, but they are used for live broadcasts and even for archival purposes. Its hard to follow a tournament unless you attend it. This needs to change. I want FIRST to do more than just "ZOOM OUT!1!!1". This post is going to be really long.

Dean wants FIRST to become a spectator sport, just like football or basketball. This would be great! We could get more sponsors and share the ideals of FIRST with a much broader audience. Unfortunately, the format of FIRST tournaments is not conducive to casual spectation. A tournament consists of a whole bunch of short and un-related matches played by too many teams to follow. IMOHO, you're not going to get an arena full of unaffiliated spectators without drastically changing the structure of FIRST tournaments.

This doesn't bother me though, because I think there's a better way to make FIRST a spectator sport. Football fans don't attend, watch, or follow every game that happens in an NFL conference; they watch the games that they're interested in on TV and on occasion expend time, money, and effort to watch them in real life. This is how FIRST could work as a spectator event.

Firstly, I want a high quality live broadcast feed that is meant and designed to be watched by people who are not in the arena but wish that they were. I would be fine with all of the resources that are currently used to produce the in house feed being diverted to the broadcast feed-- it's much more important and valuable.

Secondly, I want all of the match footage from all of the cameras to be recorded, archived, and produced into something that an average person can watch casually. Imagine The Blue Alliance with high quality videos and well thought out camera angles which match up with commentary that allows people to easily understand what is going on in the match. The match videos should be organized in a way that allows viewers to enjoy FIRST in manageable doses and in a team-centric fashion.

And who knows-- once a whole bunch of people start following FIRST online (or on TV :cool:), we might start seeing the stands fill up with dedicated fans and supporters who are truly ready to understand what FIRST is all about.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I would like to see a list displayed of:

What teams submitted for Chairman's awards

What mentors got submitted for WFA

What students got submitted for Dean's list

People work very hard on the documents and the presentations they should be noted for their efforts.

It's a chance for teams to show others how much they appreciate their mentor.

It's a chance for teams to honor that really exceptional student.

There are dead times between matches they could roll the lists a few times.

I also think that FIRST should post the submissions on their website of the winning WFA,Deans and CA awards. Most teams put them someplace, but having 66 of them to look at each year would be an inspiration to the rest of us that are trying.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

In response to the complaints about the scoring system, I think FIRST should use the FTC ranking point system. Both the winning and the losing team, get the score of the losing team for RP.

Personally I think RP is kind of weird, but if you want RP that`s the way to do it.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I seriously hope that "it wasn't in the animation" is the only justification for this. Now, if it wasn't in any of the field drawings or even in Section 6 (which, as Eric has stated, it was), then THAT is a proper excuse. The game animation is a summary of the game and doesn't explain the logistics and specifics, and shouldn't be used as evidence for anything.
(I'm incredibly sorry if this comes off as a mean statement - it's not intended as such!)

---------

Bumpers - As Jane said, black doesn't show up on bumpers. Black does not contrast with red and blue. I was disappointed that FIRST didn't see this problem after week 1 and say "if you wrote your team number on your bumpers with black Sharpie, you'd better bring a paint pen or a silver Sharpie to your next competition to fix them so that we know what your team number is." On another bumper note, I am both a huge fan of and a huge hater of the red and blue bumpers. It's a REALLY easy way to tell what teams are on what alliance while watching the webcast. Yet, I miss the rainbow Wildstang bumpers, the bright pink of 233, and my team's own black and yellow. It makes it significantly harder for some teams to integrate their image with their robot.

Dean's List - See above. Great idea, bad execution. Nevertheless, congratulations to the teams who were able to throw together some outstanding essays, and to all of the nominees, finalists, and recipients of the award. I can't wait to see what the future of this award holds.

Control System - I don't deal with programming and electrical aspects of the robot, so I'm not even going to attempt to comment on it. I do, however, second the voice of whoever mentioned all of the robot skeletons that we'll be seeing in the future. Most teams will not be able to afford to buy new systems each year to keep old robots running. Using old robots as demo robots is a great teaching and learning tool, and I hate to see that opportunity go down the drain so quickly.

Safety - Unless the posters say "DON'T FORGET YOUR SAFETY GLASSES!" in big, bold, visible-from-10-feet-away lettering, they actually create more of a safety hazard for those who stop to read them. At MSC/formerly GLR, people stopping and slowing down to read the posters in the hallway between the pits and the que made getting your robot down there quickly a huge problem.
The things teams try to do for the safety award these days...geez. There are teams out there who do a GREAT job of integrating safety into their program and are completely safe at competitions, but are overshadowed by those who specifically try for the award at the competitions. I'd like to see the judges look more at what teams do back in their own shops. I've never judged the safety award, but from my standpoint, it seems like a lot of the judging has become a contest of who yell out "ROBOT" louder than I play music on my iPod when the robot is still a good 20 feet away than who integrates safety into their entire program for the sake of keeping their kids safe.

Championship webcast quality - Sorry, I can't watch the matches without the accompanying sound. I can deal with slight lags and occasional discoloration, but if I can't hear what's going on on the rest of the field, then I'm watching another division.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Exactly why I removed that statement. I didn't read all of the drawings and specifications, so I didn't realize they told us it was there - my mistake.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I guess you haven't met me yet :D

I do agree with your post, though. I previously started a thread about higher quality webcasts with rules, scores and standings so anyone can enjoy FIRST. Many people brought up that they would be too expensive to do. I like the idea of better quality video on TBA with different camera angles. But, I'm not sure you will find someone to volunteer to take all the time to do that. We don't even have enough volunteers to get all the events recorded, parsed, and put online.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

But if these events became TV-caliber, the # of people interested to help would greatly increase. It's a win-win situation! (can't get that stupid song out of my head)

If we're planning on making this stuff more spectator-friendly, it would be a good idea to change the score display to have a summary of penalties. It seems kinda hit-and-miss with having announcers who describe all the match penalties.

I remember when talking about something else the developer of the FMS said the GDC had planned earlier in the year to have penalties assessed real-time on the score display. That idea was scrapped because it was confusing to watch the scores go up and down. If this idea was re-applied but had a special penalty box that listed number of penalties and a quick summary of what the penalty is it would make it much more understandable to the audience

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

...speaking of negatives...

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

My main complaint is the lack of troubleshooting and reliability between the FMS and the robot radios, and the accountability that goes along with that.

If your robot doesn't connect after a certain amount of time, they just start the match anyways. Yes, that keeps the matches on time, but is that fair?
How do you tell what the problem is?
I don't mean just replace parts until it works. I mean how do you determine WHAT is going wrong?
Is it the FMS radio? Is it the robot radio? Is it the position on the field? Is it interference from illegal radios in the pit? Is there some aluminum around acting as a faraday cage and absorbing the signal? Is the signal getting blocked by one of the bumps on the field? Is the impact from coming down off the bump affecting it?
We don't know.
We don't have any way of testing.
Teams are told that their radio is broke, and if they want the FMS team to work with them, all they can do is replace it.
But it connected successfully before. What could have happened to break a robot radio? Do they wear out after a few hours of use?

We don't know.

We need a way of testing this, and testing the fields. Is the only way of testing it to try it on the actual field?
How about some quantitative data? What's your % packet loss? How long are the packets taking to get there? What's the signal strength?
What's the amplitude of 5MHz or 2.4MHz radio as you travel around the field? Are there nodes of strong and weak signal?

What can we do to create a test for these things and make it available at regionals? Very few teams have access to a computer engineer with the experience with 802.11n to make a test for this.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I wanted to show someone some video of our robot scoring goals from midfield so I looked it up on Blue Alliance. I knew of a match from our regional that ended 7 - 0 with us scoring 6 of the goals. there was not a single good shot of us scoring. Lots of the nice driver shots and some robots driving in circles but none of the scoring.
ZOOM OUT!

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

What would be nice is some quick and efficient way to reprogram a radio to work with a test field setup. Having an alternate SSID transmitter on the practice field would work great. Running a test FMS setup isn't that hard to do (laptop w/ basic FMS + wireless router (needs to be copy of field one or similar to handle encryption though) + ethernet switch = full system). If the robot works just fine on that field, the problem must be specific to some different element of the field FMS. It also means a place where you have plenty of time to debug and also look at the hidden information such as packet latencys.

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.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

WiFi is great for using my laptop to get on the internet, which usually is not a critical thing. WiFi is not so great for making a robot control system, which NEEDS to work NOW, and can cause lots of disappointment and possibly physical damage if it does not work.

Two black boxes and two radios is all we really need to control our robot.

The manual is getting pretty thick....especially when you include all the info about the various parts of the control system....is the problem that teams (team members) don't read it, or that they can't read it and understand it and remember it all?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The inspectors
 

It was not that he was in a rush at all. and we did ask him not to move our robot but he had done it regardless of our request saying it should not damage our robot. and also to add to that every time we have moved our robot while it has been off we have damaged atleast one jaguar this year we have went through atleast 8. On another note i do appreciate all the volunteers that help with FIRST robotics and thank them for there help and support.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

We ended with a 4-4-1 record, and still managed to be so close to the bottom, it's not even funny. While we wouldn't have been top-8 material, I'm sure 48th out of 60 wouldn't have been our fate with the last system. And we had just fixed all our issues by the last match, so who knows what would have happened in elims?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

If that's the case, then EVERY event on your field's route should have had similar problems. Every field out there has been in use for a long time now--I'd guess since about 2003 or so for some, with various additions and tweaks to allow for the expansion that happened in 2005. They're overhauled every year to make sure they're ready for competition. They can handle a 150 pound robot. The only thing that changes is what goes inside the field border/above the driver's station, and which field goes to which events.

To say that all of the field problems from this year were from recycling last year's field is ridiculous, especially when there's a good chance that you didn't even get the same field.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Other than the gate cover issue (which happened at every event from what I saw on webcasts) I noticed no issues with the same field when we used it a week later here in Minnesota.

If there were any problems with the field itself the event volunteers managed to hide them from us pretty well.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Einstein has the FLL fields on it during Thursday and Friday. Something tells me mixing robots and middle schoolers wouldn't turn out so well.

I don't have very many complaints about this year, aside from the standard "webcast video angles are horrible every year" and "remember to be courteous of teams sitting behind you when you want to stand during a match - if it was your view getting blocked you'd be annoyed too". Our team has it particularly bad here because we use laptops for scouting, and it's nearly impossible to stand and scout with those - it's much easier to stand with paper.

I must be one of the few people who actually liked the new seeding system - yes, it was a bit harder to explain to people, and it does need tweaking so that teams intentionally lose to save their scores (i.e. curie #100), but it's a bit better in the end. Maybe.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Maybe there needs to be eight cameras - six focusing exclusively on each robot, one for an overall field, and one focusing on drivers, crowd, etc.

I know that isn't very practical or feasible, but it would make it much easier to enjoy when you want to watch your team only :D

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Figure about $40/hour for a ten hour day for camera operator (time and one half after that) plus $800-1000/day rental of camera plus any shipping.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I agree. My team had experienced very little field related issues in our first two district events (GVSU and Traverse City). Also, during the practice matches of MSC on Thursday (these matches were held on the real field) we had NO problems. However when we went to the Michigan State Championship our first two days were plagued with field issues. Interestingly, these issues were inconsistent. One match we would be fine, but the other we would be dead in the water. We had a field technician take a look at our robot, and he made several suggestions - all of which we followed. However, we continued to have these issues throughout those two days.

Needless to say this was incredibly frustrating. Starting on Friday we had several students and a mentor keeping track of robots that were "dead in the water" during matches, what alliance they were on, and their station. We also went to these teams and asked them what happened - most replied that they suddenly lost comms with their robot and that they didn't have the problem since. We compiled our results and looked for patterns, but saw none. We then embarked on analysing the wireless spectrum for interference, but didn't find any except a team using wifi in the practice field, something that is totally unacceptable.

While these students were keeping track of who was dead in the water, the pit crew and drivers were busy replacing every part of the robot imaginable. Each time we made a change (replace radio, take out code, etc) we tested it on the practice field where it worked perfectly. But when we took it out for a real match we would intermittently lose communication or sometimes power. Importantly, we made one change at a time before we went out to the real field.

What ended up solving our problems was completely swapping the cRIO and taking out camera code. At Atlanta, we borrowed a local team's cRIO, and had ours tested. The NI rep tested our cRIO and said that nothing was wrong. This leads me to three possible conclusions:
1. The camera code all of a sudden (after no changes) decided to break
2. Right after practice matches the cRIO broke which cause inconsistent failures throughout the two days
3. The FRC's field system is broken

I'd also like to point out that rookie teams and veterans (1918 & 33 are who I remember the most) experienced these exact problems, and the FTA did nothing about it. What's worse is that even when all three robots of an alliance were down (this actually happened at MSC) the field technicians didn't even call for a rematch or admit that there was a problem. I'm sorry, but that's just wrong.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Not that I am defending the field but you left out...
4. Metal in the Crio that fell out when you turned it over or removed it from robot (ethernet ports, or other openings).
5. Intermittent power supply to the Crio (short or open).
6. Corrupted Crio image due to 4 or 5 above.
7. Bios power option mis-set in Classmate.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

We didn't have many problems at MSC, although we had alot at Kettering.

Kettering:
Thursday night we had our radio programmed and ran two practice matches. All was well.
Friday morning, our first qual. match. 3 seconds after exiting autonomous, we went over a bump and died. They blamed the issue on the radio and claimed it was our fault. We replaced the radio with one from spare parts, duct taped, and zip tied all of the wires like crazy. All was well with the radio after that.
I think it was the third of fourth qual, the drivers went out, and just drove around. From the stands, we couldn't figure out why they didn't hang, kick, or collect balls. They came back and told us that none of Kitty's controls worked at all. We opened up the box, examined the Cypress board, unplugged it, etc, but it just didn't communicate with Driver Station. We then asked a team we know (2337) if we could borrow theirs since we were not using ours, we plugged it into my laptop and flashed it with the FRC image, and plugged it into the Driver Station. Nothing. Reboot Classmate. Nothing. Reboot classmate again. Their, it works. Really annoying.
Thinking we had fixed the problem, we went out for our next match. And the same thing happened again (it might have been two matches later, but it happened again). Reboot once. Nothing. Reboot again. Then it worked again. Since then, we have booted the Classmate two matches prior to ours in the queue so we have enough time to reboot it twice if it dosen't work. The really annoying part is that NI knows how to fix this, but FIRST will not let them release a patch because it does not affect enough teams.

During a few matches at Kettering, we experienced lots of lag, but only when on the field (not on tether or at home). We removed the camera code (which we intended to use) and that solved everything.

Troy:
We duct taped our radio again and all was well, some more Classmate reboots delay matches.

MSC:
More duct tape and happiness, except a few Classmate reboots to delay matches.

CMP:
Lose battery cable on one of the batteries killed us during a match, but we recovered after it rebooted (which takes 1/2 a minute at least).
We also delayed a match a few minutes because the Classmate had to be rebooted, but the FTA was nice and waited until we were ready to start the match.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The problem with this is you will still end up with a 6v0 situation, where everyone scores as much as possible ibn one goal, but alternating goals. if you really want to have a competitive ranking system, give each team their own score, so alliances compete as a team and against each other. Including the other teams points in your seeding points (especially in the losing teams points), turns the game from straight competition where you compete like you would in elims, to a strategically played game where you don't play all out, but play to get the most seeding points you can. This makes it much harder for scouts to see the true capabilities of both bots and the drivers, and as a result the quality of play in elims may suffer.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I agree with much of what has been said in this post. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet was the large amount of parts that teams were allowed to withhold during shipment per R38. Many teams took full advantage of this, but spent all Thursday rebuilding their robot. Many teams did not make it out for their practice matches, and waited until the last second to get inspected. I know this put a lot of strain on the inspectors and the field technicians.

While I don't really want to go back to crating (or bagging) the entire robot and control system on ship day, I do think that 65 pound allowance was too much.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Well, some of the NorthEast and MidAtlantic teams might think that 65" of snow was too much, too! :p

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

All I would like is a place to test the communication between FMS and your robot, no field needed. That would have saved us some matches, turns out a short in the camera was blocking the signal.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I disagree - except for the height issue, which was mostly dictated by the need for clearance over the bumps.

The use of the color to determine the alliance was a great idea. I'd even like to see more specific shades of red and blue, no navy blue, no orange-red, just the proper colors. Perhaps the cloth could be put in the KOP to ensure consistency.

I'd add the requirement that the numbers be bright white as well. From my observations, most were already and were easily read. There were a few black-on-blue or blue-on-red combinations that were hard to read. White worked well. They dictate number size already, making white mandatory would help keep them legible.

If you want personality, decorate the rest of your robot. The bumper colors and legible numbers are a great improvement for fans in the stands and on webcasts.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Actually, we made it out onto the practice field very quickly every time we needed to (except when they started tearing the fields down before the competition was over!!!).

We simply went up and and got into the fill line, then I watched the field volunteer and made sure to catch their eye so they knew we were there. I think the longest we ever waited was 15 minutes.

I did absolutely hate having to remove our radio to drive wirelessly, so after the first time we tethered and ran that way.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Even not one judge came to out pit. how do the other teams won in prizes at the chanpionship when none of the judges came to our pit? I DON'T KNOW.

In the WPA key staion there was only one computer that set the routers to Curie field and this computer didn't work so they had to set our router manualy.

The field issues were exactly like in Israel Regional :( :( ):

We got penalties on nothing when other teams didn't got penalties when itg was obvious they should get penalty.

I left the CMP with bad taste in my mouth.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I don't mean to dismiss this as baseless concern as there are clearly teams that have had issues with the fields this year.

Having said that, if field issues are following your robot it has to make you wonder if it's really the field doesn't it?

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

i think the main motive behind the bumpers was the creation of an alliance indicator that would fit in the tunnel.

mandatory white would not be bad, but elimination of this year's bumpers would be better.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

The game this year was designed well, except for the goals. If they knew a great number of teams would be the right height to go under the tunnel, why make the goals shaped to trap of this height in them if they got too close? In the very last match on Einstein, 2041 and 294 both got stuck in the blue alliance's goals, completely blocking any balls that could have gone in. If they did not get stuck, the alliance of 469-2041-1114 may have won that match and even the entire competition! As much as I hate to say it because this year's game was a huge step up, it was poor planning on the GDC's part.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

2041 was not trapped because the goal was too short, they got trapped because they got turned sideways. There is a small lip on the goal which is necessary to keep balls from rolling out, 2041 managed to get their one set of wheels parallel to and up against this lip in a fluke occurance.

I did not see 294 get stuck during that match (doesn't mean it didn't occur). I did see 294 purposely block the other goal, they were the opponent after all.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

294 didn't get stuck. I'm 100% certain they wanted to be in exactly that spot for as long as possible.

Your point does stand though... those goals were really easy to get stuck in :(

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

Care to elaborate on these statements. The first one mostly.

Re: 2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative
 

I don't know how you can blame a robot getting stuck in the goal on the GDC. The field drawings showed all of the dimensions of the goals. If a team doesn't want to risk getting stuck then they need to plan around it.





James