[sethmo38]

Thanks for the writeup. We also had our first qualifier over the weekend and our first match was ugly with the sports start. Things went smoother after the first match. I was the FTA and I made sure that everyone had their autonomous opmodes selected and initialized before we randomized their beacons even though nobody could hit the buttons.

Starting wasn't so much the problem as stopping when the match was over. One team climbed into the low zone after end game, but did not hit stop on the phone and accidentally hit the controller and bumped itself off the mountain. I had to take away their points and give them a warning. I went around to all the teams in the pits after this and let them know that their coach needed to hit the stop button when the buzzer sounds, otherwise we would have to give out penalties for movements after the buzzer.

I think I will have our programmer write up some simple code to stop the robot after 30 sec and 2 min and send it to the coaches of the teams in our league. I see this as the only solution to stopping the robots after the buzzer.

Other than that, the new system wasn't so bad. I did have to help several teams get their robot restarted while on the field waiting to start. Every time they had an error on their phone, turning off the bot, unplugging the phone usb, closing the app on the RC phone, waiting 10-20 seconds, then powering everything back up fixed the issue.

We had three teams show up with non-working robots. I was able to help two of the teams to get their robots up and working.
-One was having an error while using AppInventor. I do not know AppInventor, so I showed them how to get a tank drive bot going from a default PushBot build
-The second team did not have an opmode programmed and they did not understand the wiring/use of the legacy controller. They also crimped their own Anderson Power Pole connectors, but did not use the tool properly and had a loose connection. I showed two of their members and their coach how to use the crimp to get a good connection and walked through the Java programming with their programmer. They were able to compete in 3 out of the 5 matches and were super excited.
-The third team had Java programming issues and also the same issue with the Anderson Power Pole connectors. We just didn't have enough time to get them going to compete. I stayed after and helped them sort out their issues though.

I think it was too early in the season for our League to hold a meet, but it is what everyone agreed on. At least it gave the teams a good idea of where they need to be for the next meet in December