Beta competition
 

There is a beta competition being held in Merrimack, NH on Saturday. 1922 will be there. I was just curious what other teams will be there.

(Darn, you can't change the spelling of a thread title.)

Re: Beta competition
 

What competition is it? I haven't heard of it.

Re: Beta competition
 

You can't, but I can :)

Obviously Manchester's a bit of a hike for us down south, but take lots of photos and tell us what you see!

Re: Beta competition
 

http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2010...-beta-day.html
http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2010...e-to-heat.html

Re: Beta competition
 

2791's on the wait list, so we probably won't be there.

Re: Beta competition
 

Thanks for fixing the title.

I just hope it's as much fun as Mayhem in Merrimack was.

Re: Beta competition
 

1071 will be going. Can't wait. Hope to see a bunch of you all there!

Re: Beta competition
 

Hello from Team 166!

The following teams are signed up to attend:

228 Team Gus
238 Cruisin Crusaders
175 Buzz Robotics
3126 FlashPoint
811 Cardinals
166 Chop Shop
337 Hard Working Hard Hats
1749 Wapack Renaissance Robotics
40 Checkmate
1517 P4
2648 Infinite Loop
1922 OzRam
3183 EPIC
151 Tough Techs
1071 Team Max
2016 Mighty Monkey Wrenches
963 Robo Techs
3074 New School Robotics

We can't wait to see all of you here, it looks like this will be a great event! The furthest teams appear to be from Ohio and West Virginia, so it's pretty cool.

Re: Beta competition
 

I wish I wasn't working just so I could come and watch!

Re: Beta competition
 

Thanks, Matt, for the excellent list! Out of curiosity I added the teams' locations:


40 Checkmate - Trinity, Manchester, NH

151 Tough Techs - Nashua, NH

166 Chop Shop - Merrimack, NH

175 Buzz Robotics - Enfield,CT

228 Team Gus - Meriden, CT

238 Cruisin Crusaders - Memorial, Manchester, NH

337 Hard Working Hard Hats - Logan, WV

811 Cardinals - Bishop Guertin, Nashua, NH

963 Robo Techs - Columbus, OH

1071 Team Max - Wolcott, CT

1517 P4 - Bishop Brady, Concord, NH

1749 Wapack Renaissance Robotics - Peterborough, NH

1922 OzRam - Contoocook/Weare, NH

2016 Mighty Monkey Wrenches - Ewing, NJ

2648 Infinite Loop - Oakland, ME

3074 New School Robotics - Kennebunk, ME

3126 FlashPoint - Hollis, NH

3183 EPIC - Bristol, CT

This ought to be great fun.

Re: Beta competition
 

The fields running, the pits are up, and we're ready for all the teams coming tomorrow!!

Re: Beta competition
 

You guys did a great job for Mayhem, so if things run that smoothly it should be a lot of fun. I'm ready. (As long as nobody is locked in the room)

Re: Beta competition
 

Don't worry, we'll make sure that it doesn't happen again.
It should be fun, we've even got some stuff prepared to keep the audience sane during the downtimes (when they're fixing bugs or w/e).

Re: Beta competition
 

Had an awesome time!

It was a great competition, and I had alot of fun. Got some good audio clips from the finals as well as a good analysis on the new bridges.

Plus I'm kinda excited for those new bridges, I hope FIRST adopts them.

Thanks to 175 and 60 for being our Alliance Partners. It was close in the finals but a great end.

Thanks to FIRST for allowing us to be their test subjects.

Finally thanks to 166 for an awesome event. Things couldn't have gone smoother. Can't wait for next year!

Re: Beta competition
 

Who won? How did the new technology go? Alliances?

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