We used the Chesapeake field on Long Island after you were done with it. Now it's on it's way to Atlanta.
Blue 2 was indeed very, very slow to link up, and we spent a lot of effort making sure whatever team was in that spot got cabled up as quickly as the field was ready.
With that said, however, Blue 2 was not the cause of any failures during a match, and I paid particular attention to that station. That doesn't mean teams didn't blame it, because it was out of the ordinary and that always makes people suspicious and quick to blame.
The delay in linking up did finally go away when I swapped out the Blue controls for another reason.
The FMS worked every time. That doesn't mean we didn't find cause to swap out cables, have robots slow to connect initially, or pour over the field stats. With every robot failure during a match I was able to identify a root cause and have the team correct it in time for their next match. Team's were still accusing the field of course, but every one of them found what I told them to look for when they got back to their pits. It pays to follow up with each team and then stand with them the next time they have a match. Troubleshooting the field is a psychological as well as a technical exercise. It means talking with each and every team, finding out what they were doing when the robot stops moving, what they last worked on in the pits before the match. Wires pulled out when a cover was shut, batteries with bad cells signified by precipitous drops in voltage by multiples of 2, a cRIO reset itself only once, robots that ran off on their own and stopped responding to the driver, loss of power, DB9's knocked out of drive stations unnoticed, Watchdog's going unfed or worse on the hairy edge of flickering between enabled and disabled, radios going dead or intermittent during a match.
Troubleshooting is an engineering exercise and it pays off big to keep a clear head and not blame unknowns, such as the field, or assuming it couldn't be your robot. That only blinds you to discovering the cause and correcting it. It's also very important that the field crew not randomly throw out blame, but investigate everything about the field that they have control over. I stopped some of our crew from automatically blaming the radio when robots can't link with the field. If you can't positively identify a cause, even if it's by progressively and systematically replacing cables and black box components, then don't tell teams it's the fault of xxx! I worked the WPA at another regional and the field would sent robots back to us blaming the WPA. Not once was it the WPA, and that misdiagnosis undermined the team's confidence in the field personnel. We organized differently at SBPLI. Whenever a robot had communication issues that couldn't be resolved on the field during Practice Day it was just sent to software inspection. In the heat and passion of the competition analytical thought sometimes gets left behind, but that's where it serves you the most. I do still have one team insisting that that it couldn't be their wiring, because they hadn't touched it, so it had to be the field. Even though other mechanisms on their robot were operating fine and only their two drive Jaguars were giving the "no pwm" blink. They're still speaking to me only because they won
.
We didn't start a single match at SBPLI without
every robot in place and communicating with the field (except for one robot who missed a few matches after they burst into flames...
). We did a lot of team training throughout Friday, beginning with the queuers checking for plugged in bridges and making sure the drive teams plugged in when they were told, the field crew making sure the robots were promptly powered up, the tech crew running around troubleshooting non-communicating robots. Driver Stations were dead when they arrived on the field, but we quickly swapped them out with spares we held ready. None died during a match. That doesn't mean teams still didn't forget to turn their robots on, or plug their bridges in, or even completely forget their battery at least once. Yes, we sometimes picked up after them, but we didn't disappoint all those other team members who worked hard for this single event they're able to attend this year.
We were running 5 minute turnarounds and had to slow down to 6 minutes to give the scores time to post. We were able to deliver 11 matches and the solid performance of the field (along with terrific scorers, refs, field reset, queuers, and of course the teams themselves) is what made that happen.