[mtaman02]

Just to elaborate on what Mark has said thus far which he mostly covered everything in great detail...

As the FTAA of the SBPLI Regional we had approached a different kind of sequence then what FIRST had suggested (won't go into details on that). After we seen that we could easily shave a few seconds to a couple of minutes off on this somewhat new sequence the next thing "I" looked for was immediate connection between Robot <-> DS Robot <-> FMS DS<-> FMS. Once I got a green light on my screen that everything is linked the "tree" would also simultaneously green up. After that I started looking for Battery Voltages and Connection Stats and noted anything that would / had caused a team to stop dead in the match throughout the entire match... (some of you noticed me coming to talk to you b/c of low voltages / no voltage reading or some other form of tech advice besides what Mark would have also said)... To my understanding unlike the previous system, this system here can drain a battery well and still keep communicating but too avoid getting to that point as soon as the voltage dropped below 10 1/5 vdc and consistently dropped or steadied out I cautioned the teams to change out the battery for a charged one. With loads of help from Mark and Bharat I was able to give them an exact error that I seen whether by looking at the screen OR looking at the team and their robot themselves. They promptly went over, investigated and solved in a timely manner.

Yea we did have a robot sit dead in the water by disable and if I'm not mistaken it was a DS E-Stop error or Automatic Disable when the match started [Don't remember which one], we had hard reset the DS and Robot to try and fix this... After running a back to back match after the error had occured the team ran fine. Whether it was FMS or the Field Monitor lockup I cannot say only b/c to much stuff went on during the match reset. Aside from that the only other robot to miss matches was indeed 263 for their unfortunate burnout which was later corrected.

That's why I cannot stress it enough that when your regional is well run and is being widely talked about you really need to thank those involved =), Teams for their continued understanding and cooperation, Volunteers and Coordinators who keep the regional going on time and flawless =). I don't think I've seen any other regional work harder to ensure and achieve the multiple goals set forth other then the Championship itself.