[aklego]

Whew. I just finished FTA'ing our state championship. I'm sold on the concept of samantha but not the current hardware. I FTA'ed at a regional several weeks ago and there were huge differences. At the regional, NONE of the teams had used samantha before. (All were from rural Alaska and their schools were 100% Mac based, hence no FCS.) As a result, all of their modules were brand new. We plugged them in and, excepting the low battery issues, they worked perfectly.

Yesterday was quite different. (We had some interference from an existing network that was jumping channels but that was quickly resolved and the affected match was replayed. And, contrary to rumors, there was not a jammer in the building.) The biggest issue was the samantha robustness. Or, more correctly, its lack thereof. Known powerhouses that had been using their modules for months were the ones having problems. Their modules had intermittent faults. Most frustrating, unless the module was really toasted, the problems would only occur during a match. The culprit, confirmed by the onsite FIRST rep, is weak solder joints. The "Samantha Best Practices Guide" is only a bandaid, and does nothing for teams that may have inadvertently damaged their module before it was published. We also had lots of locked up NXT's and the previously mentioned guide would indicate that samantha hardware faults were again the cause. Burned out LED's were also not rare. Bluntly, samantha was beta tested on 1,645 unsuspecting teams this year. The test results are in and the samantha hardware did not pass.

FIRST would do well to publicly admit the issues sans candy coating and explain how it is going to be rectified next year. It is safe to say that teams are tired of control issues.

As an aside, one thing that would be helpful would be to provide significant realtime information to teams. The small battery icons next to team numbers on the timer display are a great start but they are hard to see, especially in the heat of battle. I would not have been adverse to having a rep from each team looking over my shoulder at the FCS screen--It would have made my job easier for teams to see the disconnects as they happen.

Having said all that, from the reports of some events, our tournament was an unqualified success. We had 40 teams, each had 5 matches and we finished qualifiers a mere 15 minutes behind schedule.