Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan Anderson
[These all relate to the big screens in the pit.]
Not having the field video showing was a disappointment, and made it difficult to know how close to on schedule the matches were.
There was a sign by Pit Admin advising everyone to pay attention to the "dynamic" match schedule in order to know when to leave for queuing, but the displayed schedules always seemed to be the originally published times.
After the qualification matches were finished, it would have been better to show the alliance selection screen rather than the now-empty match schedule.
The Galileo screen had the Windows task bar hiding much of the match score information at the bottom of the screen for a while. Nobody in Pit Admin knew anything about where the displays were coming from or who could do something about the problem.
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Perhaps the cost savings forced onto FIRST by the economy had something to do with not having video in the pits. They did have video last year.
The dynamic schedule should have shown when each actual match started. If you view the online results at FIRST's website, you'll see the actual times the match was started (
for Galileo). For example, when Friday's opening ceremony ran long and forced us to start match 1 at 9:42 instead of 9:25 as scheduled, all the following match schedule times were moved. Three matches scheduled to begin before lunch were actually moved to after lunch. As far as I can tell, match times will never be moved back before the original scheduled time however. Much of Saturday morning we were running ahead of schedule. We did in fact wait until the scheduled time for one robot. I was not in the pit to verify what was on the screen, but I'm pretty sure that the display was the current dynamic schedule. This year FIRST had available an internal VOIP phone system linking the inspection stations, pit admin and the fieldside scoring tables. If that is available in future years, please ask pit admin to check with us.
I'll pass the suggestion about the alliance selection screen on to the software person. I know that was visible in the pit last year, but that might have been because there was a copy of the video feed which was showing the alliance selection display in the dome.
The pit display is run by a laptop in the pit area connected to the scoring server fieldside. Had you voiced this comment to one of us at the scoring table, we could have had someone look into it. In a perfect world, everyone who volunteers for FIRST would know the answer to every question. I'm sorry you didn't get a helpful answer.