Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Apparently we disagree.

Written English is an imperfect medium. You saw an accusation of cheating and an attitude of sour grapes. I saw someone writing what many other people are curious about. When it looks like the system has been hacked, has it really been hacked? or are there other explanations? It is a fascinating topic.

The answer was that "Yes" there are many explanations other than malicious mischief.

Your last message describes many assumed motivations and attitudes that might be truly present in some minds, or might not. They certainly aren't declared in what I remember reading. If you found them between the lines, you might want to stop reading that part of this thread.

Unless you know something about the situation that the rest of us don't, please don't be so quick to assign negative motivations to an author when other explanations for their curiosity exist.

Gee, that last sentence contains a meme that sounds familiar.

Blake

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I already said, multiple times, I think he approached the topic wrong, and I would hope he learned that. That being said, being concerned (albeit and admittedly mistakenly) about the security of the arena network is not sour grapes. It's a concern. He voiced it, he was educated, he has learned something, this thread was enlightening for many people, myself included.

As far as an example, I would have approached it something like this:
I also do not think Brandon has anything to be ashamed of, and I do believe he has certainly learned. I also don't think his concerns cast a shadow on the teams that won the event, it wasn't as if he accused them of cheating, and I certainly don't believe they'd have taken it that way.

FIRST is supposed to inspire STEM and show students what the 'real life' does with it, and in the real life there will always be people looking to undermine the system to their own personal gain. I don't think (thankfully) it's present at a great capacity in FIRST, but I am concerned it could be if people stop asking "What's really keeping us secure here?" however I think you'd have to be a fool to think it's not there at all.

It seems to me your gripe is more with being disagreed with, than the topic at hand. Based on that, and the fact that at this point I believe I've made my case on this matter as abundantly clear as I can, and I am stepping out of the discussion unless the topic becomes more relevant to the actual original topics of this thread. If you really insist on following up, then you're welcome to PM, IM, email or carrier pigeon me.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Really now, how many quotes am I going to have to put in my signature? :P

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I find it amusing you like my jokes, my kids on my team tell me they're 'old person' jokes, call me Dark Ages and throw tomatoes at me...

Matt

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Don't mind me, I have a strange sense of humor. Even explosions make me laugh.

...and I'm out of tomatoes.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Don't cast aspersions on your friends- even the ones you don't know.
Especially in a public forum.

If someone uses phrases like "extremely fishy" and "very suspicious manner" and the team's teacher writes: "Do I think my student jumped to a rash decision and posted this thread before he thought of what it is implying? YES"

Intent and implication are two separate concepts.

I'll assume the teacher has a better read on the situation and I'll assume the people of FIRST are friendly and I don't need to worry about cheaters. You are welcome to assume other things.

Intentional misquotes are generally never welcome.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I don't believe that any of the teams have any reason to cheat, though there still may be some out there that might want to try. My original thoughts were that some students might want to hack for fun. You know, we're all geeks here, that's entirely possible. After all I've read, I still believe it's possible, but I no longer think that it has any likelihood of having occurred at FLR.

It's probably worth mentioning that I wrote the original post at 1 AM and my judgment wasn't the greatest, and I do regret parts of it, but I am unable to edit the post, so I guess what happens happens. It might also be worth mentioning that I was nearly barred from going to competitions with my team and am not currently on good terms with some people because of that post, but I felt I was doing the right thing by bringing hacking up as a possibility in the competitions.

All I wanted was to gather opinions and maybe get someone looking into what might be breachable in the system, and that's exactly what happened. There is also the unfortunate outcome of people who misunderstood my post, or understood it in the incorrect way that I wrote it. I'll admit I'm at fault for not waiting until I was awake enough to make proper sense.

Hopefully someone will read through the whole forum before accusing me of accusing someone of cheating next time, and hopefully my team will understand what I was trying to do.

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

Well, I'm glad we averted the downfall of Western civilization.

Anyone have anything interesting left to say about the original topic?

Re: Possible FLR Hacking?
 

I think the original topic was something along the lines of ...

" At the FLR regional, there were a number of robots that seemed to not be controlled by their team DS. They seemed to ignore inputs, would deploy minibots on their own, or lose comms and come back just as the match was ending. What are some possible explanations? Is is possible or likely that someone hacked the field or some of the networks and took control of the robots?"

On that topic, I'd say that another possible explanation for some of the robot movement that doesn't obey joystick input is that the team autonomous code wasn't finished. In NJ, I believe we saw five teams using Java and C++ whose exit condition for autonomous was not correct or whose autonomous would destroy objects that teleop would try to use. The result was that their tests worked fine in the pits, but on the field, their robot would mostly sit there and ignore controls. Sometimes the robot would crash due to null objects or invalid objects. Running a DS practice mode test would usually reproduce the effect in the pits. Other times it was necessary to alter the device boot sequence and run the practice match. If this happened, and a team had a more active autonomous, their robot would effectively be taking the DTF challenge of full auto. That may explain some of the odd behavior.

Other explanations -- low batteries can cause intermittent dropout of pretty much anything on the robot, and devices take different amounts of time to boot. If the robot reanimates after about a minute, I look at power to the radio. If it reanimates after ten to fifteen seconds, I look at the cRIO power.
Mechanical difficulties or loose wires can easily cause some inputs to make sense and others to be ignored. Robots that lose chains or PWM cables are really hard to drive, and until the team finds the smoking gun their mind is racing as to what caused that behavior.

As to whether or not it is possible to hack the field, I'd say that it was made my man and can be broken by man. It is possible. However, it is far more likely that a tornado will tear off the roof and six lightning bolts simultaneously scorch each of antennae on the field radio.

Also, if the field is hacked, hackers almost always leave footprints. I'm pretty sure FTAs and FIRST would quickly spot it and have tons of data to identify how it took place.

Finally, there are tons of easy ways to have fun at a FIRST regional. I suspect even the most hardened hacker would rather collect buttons or watch scoring trends. Making a team's robot sit still for 90 seconds just isn't that great by comparison. Maybe it would be fun to make their BFL blink morse code messages such as "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!", "I'll be back", "Hasta la vista, baby", or "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.". When I see that, I'll believe the field hack is more likely.

Greg McKaskle

Re: Possible FLR Hacking? Field control drop outs and
 

Robot Dlink dropouts can cause this.
The FTA's are not looking for this during the came. You will see them going over to the driver's control panel when the interruption is long enough. They have no log on their side which would show them.
Do not assume any diagnostics on their part except when they are only testing one robot during the new field control inspection test. Even then they can only diagnose to a very limited extent when a problem does arise, such as having the robot's Dlink visible, but not achieving two way communications.
Any robot which has only 10 volts is completely unpredicible and by far the most common problem. The second is intermittant dropouts of field control two way comms, Dlink itself losing power mementarily (which is why they gave us a new 12v-5v voltage control this year), after that you can have dropouts of the CAN, CAN2 or jaguars themselves. Each time this happens the systems come back one at a time and you're actually lucky if there's a clean re-start within 90 seconds.
Don't waste a single minute worrying about sabotage.