Hi Guys,
I'm the coach for team 180 SPAM. I feel for the teams that had communications problems. We were also one of them when we switched from blue to red. We lost comms for a good 30-45 seconds in the second half of the last match and then connected for a last futile 10 seconds of play. We have had comm problems this year as well, and I worked very closely with Joe Hershberger to help find and solve (or at least patch) our problems.
At the South Florida Regional, we had a match where the field was having problems connecting to the other teams on the field and so our robot sat for a while. Even though everything was green and we never lost comms, our robot never moved. It turns out that our code had thrown an exception at one point and VXWorks had killed our main robot task. There is a network communications task however, that remained operational - thus, we never lost comms, but the robot was dead.
After talking with Joe, we found that we could tell the cRIO to reboot from the driver station if we saw a problem. On the charts tab on the driver station there are two lines that show the status of the system. There's one line for what the field or driver station is commanding and another line for what the robot says it's doing. When we looked at the logs, we could see that the line for the robot just stopped. It didn't show disabled or any other state, it just wasn't there. From that point on we made it a point to leave the charts tab open and reboot the robot in the event of a problem.
Now, fast forward to the Championship. After seeing 118 stationary in the first match I went over to share my sentiments about the situation and impart the valuable knowledge that I had gained over the season with them. I have no desire to win anything knowing my competitor was maimed because of something out of their control. They are a great team and don't deserve to not compete. I don't know if they ever used my suggestion, but I know that rebooting the robot was the only reason we moved again in our final match. I was also rebooting our robot every couple minutes when we were sitting for a while to make sure we didn't run into the same problems as at the SFR.
It seems to me that there is either a bug in the networking stack on the cRIO or in the field communications computer. Even until the last match, I would occasionally see networking errors on the diagnostics tab. I hope this can be rectified in the future and I'm sure FIRST is putting every effort forward to resolve this debacle.
As for the 180, 25, and 16 alliance I feel that we really were one of the best alliances out there. I feel that 16 was by far the best defensive robot at the competition. No matter who we went up against, 25 and 180 always had balls to shoot. It's a testament to 16's rugged design that they could even stay together with the incredible pounding they took every match. We never ran dry, while the other alliances were scrounging for ammo. 25 played brilliantly - both accurate and efficient. We were an alliance that worked well together and the cunning and experience of 25 and 16's coaches was invaluable in maintaining our advantage. I still can't believe the stars aligned to allow such an alliance to happen. It was an absolute pleasure to compete with both teams and I'm proud that we can now call them friends.
I do not feel that we had a tainted win, but I also do not feel that our competitors (especially in the semis) were given the chance to make their mark. I'm proud to have been able to compete against such marvelous alliances. I sincerely hope that this never happens to any teams again. There is nothing more painful than spending hundreds of hours painstakingly designing, building and perfecting a robot to have issues beyond one's control. I don't think any team on Einstein feels that the competition was completely fair, but I think FIRST handled the situation as best they could at that very moment in time. I hope that no one spouts ill-will towards any teams that competed on Einstein because the issues encountered seem beyond their control. We all stepped out onto the field, did our best and played our hearts out. It was a day I'll never forget and will cherish forever.
- Bryce
P.S. On a lighter note, we should really just enjoy the moment since the world is going to end in December anyway
.