[dtengineering]

While I wouldn't necessarily use the term "happy about field problems", I get your point. Given the situation it doesn't seem like there was much else FIRST could do.

I would also like to thank the teams that played on Einstein for their gracious response to the unforunate situation that resulted from the field failures. I know what it is like to have your playoff run cut short due to an unexplained error that you could not replicate on a robot than ran perfectly throughout an entire event (admittedly, it wasn't on Einstein, but it was significant to us). When that happened to my team, however, it was easily passed off as a robot failure (maybe they were right... who knows... the tournament moved on and no one investigated). I think that has happened several times and to several teams over the years at several events. It is only now that the problem has occurred on Einstein that FIRST has to admit that either the field had issues, or that the very best teams on the planet can't figure out how to get their robot to work reliably.

So thank you to the teams on Einstein... you had to sacrifice some of the most exciting matches of your lives... but maybe that will finally cause the root cause of the problem to be solved. I suspect that when it is, we will discover that Einstein was not a fluke and that there were warning signals leading up to it.*

Thank you to the people volunteers and FIRST staff who worked so hard to get those systems running. Thank you to FIRST for being up front, identifying that there was a problem, and doing everything you can to (finally?) get it fixed.

So yeah, I wouldn't say I was "happy about the field problems", but I will say that I will be overjoyed if this means that we come closer to having a perfectly reliable field/robot communication system.

Jason

*and is that ever a good engineering lesson... many catastrophic failures have been presaged by minor, niggling concerns that were easy to overlook