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Unread 29-04-2012, 00:00
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arizonafoxx arizonafoxx is offline
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FRC #4395 (T-Rex)
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Join Date: Jan 2007
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Re: Einstein Field issues Handled correctly?

For what is worth. One thing I was told by the FTA at an off season event. The signal to start Autonomous or Teleop is only sent once at the beginning of that state. I personally have no idea how the field communicates with the robot but this statement makes sense for why some robots don't move. If you only send a signal once and in that split second while that signal is active there is a glitch in the WiFi (which happens) then the robot misses the signal and won't ever activate that particular state. However this is not how TCP/IP is meant to work. If a signal is missed there will be a message to send the signal again for a few more attempts to help create the full packet. It seems to me that this is not happening. When a robot is not communicating with the field there are separate signals being sent to flash lights above the driver station. Why can't a simple protocol be created that while this light is flashing there are multiple attempts to tell the robot what state to be whether it be Auto or Teleop. Having a one shot attempt to tell the robot to go seems like it is leading to these problems.

How much do we know about how the field works? Can this hypothesis be proved invalid?

It also seems that when the FTA is looking at packet transfer there are packets that tell the robot to be disabled till the match starts and then there are packets after the match starts that have the data from the DS but how many packets tell the robot to switch from disable to Auto and then to Teleop. When there are only a few packets missed this does not seem like a lot to the person watching the graphs and what not on the FTA table but its not about how many packets are lost its about which packets are lost. Does the FTA have a way to tell that the packet to switch from disable to Auto and Teleop has been received properly? Can the robot tell the field that it has received the packet properly so a status flag can be used to light and led on there comms station? I agree that telling a team they have no idea what is happening is not acceptable. Anytime you say you have no idea what is happening it just means you are either A) not taking enough data points or B) you are not taking the data points on the right data.
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