Quote:
Originally Posted by de_
Make sure you have read and understood team update 14.
Today our robot was dead during part or all of 6 out of 8 matches even though it was completely mechanically functional. Twice it was caused by opponent teams robot smashing into the our wall in autonomous causing our laptop to blue screen and reboot and the second time crash on the floor and even after a reboot of the laptop, the robot autostart failed. Another team I am told had one or both of a laptop and tablet destroyed in a similar situation today. No penalty or consequences what so ever to the robots that caused it.
I think FIRST needs to immediately implement one or more of the following:
1) If a robot in autonomous crashes so out of control hard into the wall causing a driver station of the teams behind wall are immediately effected (ie their robot goes dead. a) the offending team should get no score for the match and or b) better still the match is immediately restarted.
2) Teams should be allowed to hold their laptop during autonomous so as to protect them.
All laptops are expensive fragile electronics. Velcroing them so they can be smashed about without consequence is ridiculous.
Dave Edwards
Mentor - Runnymede Robotics
Team 1310
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Update: Apparently the mentor provided laptop requires replacing. It was his personal very high end business laptop and it was used because 1) we have a rich smart dashboard environment and 2) our $1500 Dell I7 Windows 10 team laptop would not reliably connect to the field.
Clearly FIRST NEEDS to provide an updated more protection environment next year. This problem is not going to go away. For this year, they need to do everything possible to allow the drivers to protect this very expensive very fragile, very low G force rated piece of essential equipment from robots. As a professional engineer, velcroing a spinning hard drive with microscope clearances and a fragile lcd screen on plastic hinges to a high G force impact table is not a solution, its an expensive failure waiting to happen. I don't know what fund raising environments other teams are in but in our environment, raising funds for $10s of dollars
is incredibly tough, never mind $2500 for laptop replacements.
All teams I highly recommend you follow every single recommendation in Team update 14. Do bring a BRAND NEW network cable for between your bridge and roborio and replace the existing one with the first sign of trouble.
Do review your Drive Station log after every match and practice. Bring a can of compressed air to blow out any fillings, cover up every unused port on your roborio. And train your drivers to be smart and minimize the impacts to your robot when at all possible. Foot high jumps over the Rock Wall or Cheval looks cool but could cost you matches. Lastly be prepared to protect your laptop and hopefully have a backup.