Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Dognaux
Here's what we use for our setup in case anyone needs to see a diagram of how this works. It's painfully easy to setup, spent maybe an hour setting it up by myself for St. Louis. We didn't even have a volunteer to run it, I would just occasionally check up on it. Having 1 dedicated volunteer or a couple to swap out means you can do fancier stuff, but it's really not required to sit at the laptop constantly all day. A field reset person could hang out there while taking a break just to make sure it still looks good.
 |
We have banned the term "it's easy" from our team. It SHOULD be relatively easy to configure your laptop and radio to connect to the field... and yet that doesn't seem to be the case for many teams each year - even teams that already connected at a prior event. Put this in the hands of a hundred individuals at a hundred different regionals and watch total chaos commence.
Let me put this a different way. You would think mounting a go-pro on a pole and recording matches at an event would be fairly easy. Yet many regionals don't do it. Now take a step beyond that - it takes technical skills to turn that simple recording into a replay. Skills that 95% of folks that are volunteering at FIRST events don't have.
The funny thing here is that I'm arguing against something that I would actually like to have. We've had matches go for us, and against us, when they shouldn't have. I can show you a couple years ago where we should have moved on into the semifinals on our championship field but didn't because of a scoring error.