Re: Beta competition
 

195, 60 and 1071 won.

Chris,

In terms of technology that we saw and was revealed to us, we saw new bridges, and that was it (now I'm sure there was more going on however)

These new bridges are not made by Linksys (I forgot who made them. Anyone else know?). They seemed to work well. They connected very fine and from what I saw as a Driver of one of the robots that was using them, there was no issues with them. Plus both these white bridges and the old black bridges seemed to work well when both types are being used in a match.

The only thing I didn't like about these was they used 5 Volts instead of 12 which means there is an added converter.

Re: Beta competition
 

Correction: 175, 40 and 1071 won!!

Re: Beta competition
 

I had a great time. Once again, 166 Chop Shop of Merrimack did a great job of hosting, all went smooth and the food was good and reasonably priced. I saw no problems with the field communications. It was another opportunity to give our drivers experience and hopefully FIRST was able to get the test info they need. My favorite team of announcers, Dave Price and Andy Grady were there. The non-robotic highlight of the day was seeing Dave play Bobble-Head. The event reminded me of how much fun Breakaway is. It will be sad to see it end but hopefully the new game is as much or more fun.

Re: Beta competition
 

One change at the driver stations was the addition of a power adapter for the netbooks. I hope that is a permanent addition, not just a "nice to have" by the event staff. There were no field delays that I am aware of. Qualification rounds actually finished way ahead of schedule. (we had an hour for lunch!) :D

The only robot hardware test I saw was with a new robot radio. FIRST had six radios which were swapped into six different robots during the competition, and in the finals all six robots ran the new radios. The only down side I saw was that the radios were 5V and required a regulator which was rather bulky. The regulator may have been used just to make it easy for teams to swap out their radio for the test units. The new radios were slightly larger than the old gaming adapters (rectangular rather than square footprint).

During the competition FIRST had an extra bank of computers up on the scorers table hooked to two router/radios. They showed up as "interference 1" & "interference 2" on a network search. FIRST was throwing a lot of garbage at the field controls during the event. I also saw at least one enterprising student launching his own interference tests at the field controls! The field did not appear to have any issues with the flooded bandwidth. I'm not sure how much camera traffic was going on during the event. There were several teams with cameras onboard, but I'm not sure how much data each was sending back to their DS.

My casual observation is that the tests were successful and went according to FIRST's plans.

Re: Beta competition
 

finalits consisted of 175, 40 and 1071 for the winning alliance. Only equipment tested was the radios. This was only used by some of the teams, while others used original equipment. Final matches all teams used new radios.

Re: Beta competition
 

Did anyone happen to notice if the FMS Timing Bug was fixed?

Re: Beta competition
 

Kinda late, but I got some Audio recordings of the finals along with a great explanation of the new radios by one of my fellow team mates.

Check it out!
http://bit.ly/aDcrd1