This happened last season and will continue to be an issue especially with new teams constantly being introduced to the FTC. The scrimmage that was held at Georgia Tech on Nov. 18th had several similar issues. I spent about 2/3rds of the entire competition inspecting robots for the correct master code and template. Despite repeated announcements to teams that they NEEDED to have this done or else things may/will not run properly, many still fielded robots without the check being done. Since this was just a scrimmage, we did not have a hard and fast rule that teams MUST pass inspection prior to competing.
During the day, my role grew from just verifying correct code to:
- Uploading the master code
- Applying the competition template
- Rewriting entire operator programs
- In some cases writing brand new autonomous routines
Many teams that did write their own code did not bring a copy with them so their program was lost when the new master code was loaded. Now obviously for the purposes of a scrimmage and to benefit the majority of brand new teams that did not even know what a competition template was, I obviously went ABCD.
(That’s short for above and beyond the call of duty for those wondering). But during a competition, I can pretty much vouch for most inspectors and say that their roles will be limited to purely pass/fail with regards to robot code.
My take is that a pre-competition scrimmage is invaluable to teams if inspections are done comparable to that performed at the competition. When we have our pre-competition scrimmage in February, we plan to perform inspections just like those teams will encounter at the competition. They will get a copy of the inspection check list with things to correct. We did this last year and it worked very well, although there were still one or two teams that did not correct the deficiencies and were gigged by the inspectors at the competition.
Finally, I agree that the default code in all 3 FTC acceptable programming languages would be a great benefit if available to embed in the competition template. Even an abbreviated version could prove to be a time saver to those teams that just want to plug and go. The EasyC version would probably be the most utilized.