[apalrd]

1. Practice field at CMP. Almost all teams who use the practice field are looking to test specific things, in this game they are:
-Running their autonomous programs - This requires a basket and key, and possibly a bridge, all at the correct distances
-Shooting balls - This requires a basket and marked key distance
-Driving and shooting - This requires more open space than above, but the general key and basket area is usually sufficient to simulate a driver lining up
-Triple balance before elims
None of these require a field border or radios - A 50' tether is sufficient.

At MSC, there was a large carpet area with 2 baskets, 3 bridges, and two movable bumps. Teams would tell the practice field queue what they needed to test and what their setup requirements were, and he would organize where each team could be. There were no practice field radios, all teams ran on tethers. Immediately after alliance selections, the three bridges were reserved for each alliance in the order they had to play (e.g. QF1 teams gets to practice before QF4 teams), allowing each alliance to practice their triple balance. The practice field seemed adequate for the volume of teams - a 64 team event with 2 baskets and 3 bridges, allowing multiple teams to use a set of baskets at the same time

At CMP, there were two full practice fields which required several hours of advanced notice to sign up for an use. The radios also caused mass confusion due to the mis-coloring of the red and blue radios (at least on the Galileo practice field). They had a single set of baskets behind the practice field, and two more in the annex on the way to the dome. For an event of this size, there should have been at least 3 bridges and 4 baskets per division (total of 12 bridges and 16 baskets required, there were only 6 bridges and 7 baskets at the whole event this year)


2. I have to say it, the quality of teams at CMP this year was disappointing. The league is too large to hope to allow each team to go to CMP every few years, so even trying seems pointless.

3. The vision system this year was fairly good, but a different geometric shape should be chosen (how about a circle?) - There are too many bright rectangular objects but relatively few bright circular objects. I know our vision system was often confused by large white display screens directly behind fields.

4. I've already talked to a few NI people about this, but (at least in LabVIEW) most of the CPU load on the processor is overhead from LabVIEW and library inefficiency, not actual team code.

5. On a related note, the fact that teams are able to hit 90% CPU utilization without running vision on the robot amazes me. The processor is definitely powerful enough (the old IFI PIC and Vex Cortex systems run much smaller processors, and almost everything being done now could be done then), but the inefficiency is SO HUGE

6. Ball consistency on bridges. At all previous events, the field reset people were placing the balls on two holes in the center of the bridge. At CMP (Galileo division), we found that they were consistently placing them on the outside holes, or in various other symmetric but not centered positions, during our matches, but only on the center bridge. Our scouting team investigated the issue, and the balls were only being placed off-center during only our matches and in matches where teams were attempting bridge autonomous modes. When we asked the field reset and head ref on our field, they claimed that the balls had to be symmetric, nothing else, and started placing the balls on the alliance bridges differently as well. We brought a Q&A question which stated that the balls would be centered on the bridge, and they ignored it. We talked to Aiden Brown on the issue, and the ball placement stopped immediately after.