Re: Field Electronics
 

Someone apparently sent a link to this thread to me back in April, guess I should log in more often :)

You don't need a official FIRST FRC Field to to run an offseason FRC tourney of your own. FMS light will let you do start/stop of all the bots at the same time same as the official fields and you can keep track of scoring and schedule manually with spreadsheets, etc.. The information you need to do this is in the tournament portion of the FRC manual and some other tech docs floating around. All you need to run 6 robots in a match format is a laptop running FMS light, a wifi Access Point and a simple switch for each side of the field. If you set up the network right, you can do all the timing of a match in Auto and TeleOp.

The purpose of the "fancy" FIRST FRC field system is to provide a secure network for each team free from interferrence from other teams, provide real time scoring, recording and viewing for the audience to view, provide consistant automated scheduling and management between tournaments (i.e. all teams get the same number of matches with as many of the other teams as opponents and teammates as possible), provide real time ranking calculation, post web schedules, results, ranking; twitter feeds, tournament archives and about a hundred other things like displaying teams in stations, estops, team lights, game lights, etc etc. All of which could be done manually, but might take to a week or so to do a tournament at "human" speed. All of this is to provide a baseline standard of all the tournaments being similar to qualify for Championship (at least on the field) at one Regional as qualifying at another Regional. Of course some regionals may be harder than others to qualify on the field depending on the teams participating.

Yes, equipment on the field is donated through FIRST sponsorships and is VERY expensive. But FIRST also buys much of the equipment. As someone noted, Allen Bradley equipment is very good and we are extremely fortunate that Allen Bradley participates with FIRST in a sponsorship capacity. Its hard to argue the reliability we've had considering that between the 19 different FRC fields there are now, they run ~10,000 competiton matches in a season very well.

There are literally 1000s of hours of development in the FIRST FRC Field systems by guys that have been doing this sort of thing for 15 years. My team and I have been doing technology for robot competitions since the mid 90s including the TV shows like BattleBots. So IMHO building a "full on" FRC system of your own design is probably impractical. Remember, one of the questions an Engineer has to ask him or herself is the old question of "Just because I can, doesn't mean I should" :) The fields have a specific purpose (noted above) and do this very well. AndyMark did have one of the full fields they rented out this year, you'd have to talk with them about costs.

I am looking for some FIRST alumni to work on my other projects and possibly future FRC systems, anyone available in the central Florida area? I'm currently working out of the Tampa Area.

Thanks