[PhilBot]

Originally Posted by jbbjjbt

Phil,
In one of our qualifying rounds, the autonomous went haywire and the robot didn't move for a full second of teleop. Then the driver remembered the switch and off we went. It looks like a field issue but it's not.

Based on that observation I'd agree. We had the same thing happen to us in our third round.... Autonomous stalled part the way through, and then Nothing worked in teleop. We weren't sure if the program didn't transition, or if the field or controller had bailed on us.

It looks like there is a hard failure mode in the controller that sometimes can't recover. (Short of a power reset). Not being able to power-reset the NXT after a long wait prior to a match is a bit concerning as well.

An interesting point is that when our mega-fail happened, we also couldn't move our bucket, which is a sepparate Speed Controller on it's own NXT port. It might be a failure where the controller is swamping the I2C bus???
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In retrospect, we should have picked your team for our alliance.

I didn't want to say it. We WOULD have accepted

Scouting was truly a nightmare with four fields going at one time in any order.

We've also re-thought our scouting based on what we saw. We think we'll give each scout a small group of teams to "own" and have them rank that smaller set. We also think it's a good idea to note the best robot in the losing alliance each game. These may drop down the list purely due to bad pairings... but they may make a great second-pick. This is something that the coach can do after each match.