[Culvan Van Li]

I think they did the best they could in the time they had.

I would've liked to have seen them move to matches on Einstein sooner. That could've given them more time to troubleshoot the problem by putting more of the speeches and awards in between matches.

I'm amazed that this seemed to be a mystery. I work on telecommunications equipment. Part of my job is analyzing logs of communications failures. Those logs will usually pinpoint problems pretty well. Perhaps that's just because the FCC has set the bar so high. Compared to a worldwide telecommunications network the setup for the field shouldn't be that complicated. It seems to me that FIRST probably needs to add more troubleshooting and monitoring capabilities. The good news is that they control the software in the field, they control enough of the software in the robot, and they control enough of the software in the driver's station to do quite a bit. I think they probably need to add some more capabilities inside the robot, like have it log the battery voltage for the entire match inside the cRio. Ideally the system would be able to detect common robot failures that are completely unrelated to the field. That could really help improve the quality of the "it's not the field" message given to teams. I think we all want to see the best quality matches. I wish I could help more.

Andy