Quote:
Originally Posted by dcarr
The assertions in that linked post are just sad. FIRST really is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to properly exposing data and making it available in a timely manner.
In my opinion, TBA should be adopted as the official online scoring system. It already has an API, so simply getting the right data into TBA accurately and quickly will solve the problem since TBA has the rest of the infrastructure already.
Another thing that would be great is official client libraries for teams to build into their scouting systems (Probably Ruby, Python, iOS, Android would cover what most teams are using).
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I agree completely. I can't remember a time when TBA actually had a problem that wasn't caused by incorrect data from FIRST. I'm sure members of the FIRST community could come up with a more reliable method of providing the data. The issues with connectivity seem to happen even when there is a working internet connection.
Another issue that never got solved was the hot goal timing, which to me doesn't seem like an impossible task. Watch 1114 move and the goal light up in
this match. It also happened in an Einstein practice match. When you only have ten seconds, every single second matters.
Also, to me it seems that the rules are too complicated, not only for teams, but for the volunteers. Over the season we've had a few technical fouls called on us on a rule the ref could not cite, or did not exist. The referee was understanding, and changed the score when incorrect, but if members of our team hadn't studied the rules and memorized the foul numbers, and went to the question box, we would have lost a few matches we deserved to win. Again, at the championship, one our alliance partners came up with a strategy to have a blocker that would drop out of the way once teleop started, but were told it was illegal to start high up, so they spent a bunch of time trying to build a mechanism to deploy it. With this many rules, it's really hard for referees to be consistent in calling things like bumper violations (not called 5 times in the matches I watched), ramming, herding, the differences in offensive and defense possession (I didn't even know there was a difference until CMP...), and contact in frame perimeter, which can be called as a tech foul every time your robot breaks the plane of the frame perimeter, a tech foul every time your robot contacts another robot inside their frame perimeter, or a foul every time your robot "intentionally" contacts another robot inside their frame perimeter. Most of these consistency problems were at previous event, and overall, the refereeing at the championship was much better than at our other events.