[Mark McLeod]

In case you're interested...

The field problem you saw us working on Saturday morning was that one of the Blue stations wouldn't turn off it's eStop. In a matter of minutes we had systematically swapped everything out one at a time and tested each until we were left with the field control box. Unfortunately, the only spare field control box was already in use at the far end of the field. During field setup the Red field control box was not working correctly, so Mike had used the spare instead.

Luck was with us, because we'd tried to get in a few matches before Opening Ceremonies and discovered the problem early, so we just went to the ceremony while the field crew worked the issue.

We had to get that original Red field controller working, but because of the design of the Field Management System we couldn't just use it at the bad Blue end of the field. We swapped it in at the Red end of the field, troubleshot and resolved the original problem with it. Then we moved the freed up spare field control to the Blue end of the field and replaced the bad Blue field control.

We were ready to go right on time as Opening Ceremonies finished.
Someone will have to tell me how the ceremony went...

All in all, I saw no technical problems with the new Field Management System.
The Driver Stations and robot wireless would sometimes take a while to connect, especially at the Blue 2 station (slowing all the Friday matches), but that went away when we swapped out the Blue field control altogether Saturday morning.
A few design changes I'd personally make, however, I don't know that my changes wouldn't cause grief for reasons unknown to me.
We had maybe three or four false starts. One the Refs called because the orbit ball bins weren't where they were supposed to be, two others because the scorers had been correcting errors in past match scores (those were the two really fast matches- start trumpet, teleop sound, 20 seconds to go all at once), a couple of matches where a drive team accidentally disconnected their Driver Station or the plug fell out at the last second before the match started. The nice thing about the FMS this year is that it automatically cannot start a match if all teams aren't communicating. The FTA has to make a conscious choice to bypass a team, as in the case of 263 when they missed their matches while they were out getting repaired.

There were 8 or so team Driver Station failures for causes ranging from physically broken ethernet ports to failure to boot--with all the symptoms of electrostatic discharge (ESD). No one was happy with that, but we didn't let it affect a single match. We held up the matches when we had to to get every robot operational.
During the matches I saw one case of the cRIO resetting, probably due to ESD. Anti-static spray seemed to keep it from happening again. Cold Spring Harbor had a robot radio failure, but it came and went so it took me awhile to narrow down the cause by relocating the radio, then replacing the radio and cable altogether. A bunch of teams had batteries with bad cells that made their voltage drop precipitously, and many had wiring pull out.

In the pits we had 2487's cRIO failure, and various Jaguar failures were reported. Several robot radio wireless issues on Practice day were mostly due to incorrect SSID's and inadvertently pushing the Wireless Gaming Adaptor's special security button which changes the IP address (for some unknown design reason).