[Andrew Bates]

I thought that the Refs were being very professional. They were having to make do with what they had. We've known from last year that crystal interference had been a problem. This year I don't believe there was one episodes of interference from another robot/crystal. Unfortunately I do not believe that the Refs knew what the problem was so there was no way to fix it. However they were doing everything in their power to make sure there were no problems by telling us what could be causing trouble.

For example in our first round on Friday our robot moved in autonomous, not what it was supposed to do but it moved, and then during teleop mode we had no control until the last 20sec of the match. We had the two field tech guys down on their hands and knees trying to see what the problem might be. Eventually they noticed that one end of our quad encoders was on a piece of metal, i should clarify this, the quad encoders have two wires coming out one was on the metal the other was plugged in. They figured that since the other end was plugged into the robot it must be shorting. After the match we talked to them and they said that since there was no concrete evidence that it was a field problem that the match could not be re-run. They let us come over to their frequency analyzer and check to make sure that the robot and transmitter both had strong signals without any interference. After that we went back to the pits and to take steps against this happening again we replaced one of the yellow blocks on the robot, reloaded both the master and user code, and we tapped up the spare wires running from the quad encoders. In the next match we had intermittent control on our drivetrain in the first 20 or so seconds and them everything worked fine. After that match they told us that while watching the signal strength on our frequencies they had noticed no interference. We replaced the other yellow brick and in our last match everything worked as it was supposed to.

So to sum up, the refs and officials were great. They were extremely helpful in working with us to get our problems solved.