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Unread 11-03-2006, 23:44
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Btower Btower is offline
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AKA: Ben Tower
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Rookie Year: 1997
Location: Canton, MI
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Re: Week 2: So how's that Field Working?

So here's the report from GLR.

First many thanks to John from IFI, Ron from FIRST and all of the scorers and the rest of the volunteers. Personally I am exhausted, this was a very trying weekend for the field team. I'd also like to thank the students, coaches and mentors for their patience and unending professionalism. I apologize if I lost mine at any point and I hope everyone had a great time. In general the robots were the best I've ever seen (except of course for the fires ).

So here are my observations on the field and scoring.

Starting Friday Morning:

We realized after the first couple of matches, that when we went to enter the ramp points and penalties, the electronic score erased.

After the third match, the entire match list disappeared, we got it back a few matches later (we continued to run off the printed list, but scores were lost and we had to start scoring over. At this point, I decided we would use human scoring as the official score. Not perfect, but verifiable and consistent.

So then, after match 11, we realized the head ref was transposing scores on his sheet (thanks to team members for bringing this to our attention), to be honest, at that point, we had our heads buried in attempts to fix the scoring system, and were not actually watching the matches.

By late morning, the blue side of the field scoring went haywire, 42 points in every autonomous period, (+10 points), also the end score for blue was 132 points regardless of the actual scoring. At this point I decided to shut off the real time scoring display as it was pure nonsense and we had been relying on the manual scoring anyway. After lunch we determined it was not a sensor failure, but instead a DAQ box to to scoring computer comm issue. After re-initializing the DAQ box, rebooting the blue scoring computer (at the red end) and the main scoring computer eventually we happened upon the correct sequence, from that point on, the scores were recorded correctly. We monitored for a while before putting the score back on video, but had real time scoring back up before the end of the day. I chose to keep the matches going using manual scoring and put fixing the real time system on the back burner in order to stay somewhat close to schedule.

In late morning we experienced a failure to initialize a robot on the blue end. We replaced the arena controller and it ran fine for a while, the problem re-occured later in the afternoon but worked after a match restart, so we limped through the last couple of matches of the day. After the end of competiton, we tested the units, replaced the station relay and tested some more.

Saturday Morning, as we were finishing field testing after rebooting and reinitializing all computers, DAQ boxes controllers, etc... We found the initialization problem had spread to another station, on the same end. After failing to clear the problem with another arena controller, we replaced the entire box during opening ceremonies. This of couse failed to correct the problem until I combined relays from stations in both panels from stations which had not failed.

From this point onward, things actually ran well, too well of course, as lightning struck in match one of the finals when the field froze at the end of autonomous mode. The cause was a reported red zone "ball in chute", essentalltially the DAQ box on that end lost the reset signal from the main scoring computer. Another reset of the DAQ box and we were off to the races.


Again, thanks to everyone for their patience and professionalism. Thanks especially to the manual scorers for doing an excellent job of scoring game which was clearly not designed for manual scoring. Also many thanks to teams 66 and 33 for help with set up and teardown, team 857 for help with field clean up and set up Thursday night, ITT Technical schools for additional "volunteers" to help with scoring, and all the rest of the volunteers. Without them none of this can happen.


Ben Tower
GLR 2006 Field Supervisor

Last edited by Btower : 12-03-2006 at 08:00.
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