Hey All,
I was the Control Systems Advisor at the Pittsburgh Regional last week (had an absolute blast there
). Our volunteer team there carefully monitored every issue that came up with the robots in all the matches. If a robot stopped moving (or never started moving), we made sure we and the team knew why it happened.
Throughout the whole competition we did not experience a single field related issue (except for a rouge tube knocking down a tower's lights). I have had teams approach me after they see the "communication" light drop off the dashboard saying that there must be a field problem. While nothing is impossible, it is much more likely that something else was the cause. For example, if a robots battery falls out, that will also cause the "communication" light go red for obvious reasons
Mark and Joe have given excellent summaries of the common problems that were encountered in getting teams up and running. I will just add some of my own observations.
On the issue of using version DS 2.17 and 1.05. At Pittsburgh we saw both work fine, but I encouraged everyone to update their software if for no other reason than consistency on the field. And again, "couldn't hurt".
Non classmate laptops were the cause of a few weird problems throughout the weekend. We had one team using a non-classmate laptop who always had to log out and log back in to successfully connect to FMS. They would get all greens on the dashboard the first time, but FMS wouldn't see them, so we always had them just log off and log back in and it would fix it.
We also had some interesting problems with a few teams updating their cRIO firmware using non-classmate laptops. I think a few of those problems were just caused by buggy computers, but there was one case where a brand new computer running Windows 7 just could not successfully download the cRIO image. My best guess was some kind of firewall issue. We just had that team download the version using their classmate and it was fine. At least 3 teams needed to use different laptops after unsuccessfully using theirs to download the latest image.
The DLINK radios take about 1-2 minutes to connect after power on. In order to keep up 6 minute match cycles we had everyone power on their robots as soon as they hit the field (unless they had a gyro). We kept track of which robots got powered on last so we knew which ones to wait for while the radios connected and not accidentally bypass them while they were still connecting.
Thats pretty much all I can remember right now. If anyone had an issue that went unexplained or was thought to be a field problem, please PM me and I would be happy to try and investigate it. Always looking for potential problems
