Delaware Regional Pilot Vex Tournamnent

[Bill Moore]

This is an announcement for the Delaware Regional Pilot Vex Tournament, which will be held Saturday, January 21, 2006 at the University of Delaware.

More information for teams, and visitors can be found at the tournament website.

Come on out and see FIRST's latest competition and cheer on each team.

[Ken Delaney 357]

I am getting ready to leave for the event right now. If this is run anything like your Duel on the Delaware event, it should be an awesome time. I am really looking forward to competition. Here is one huge advantage of FVC over FRC. I packed all of our team gear for the competition in the trunk of my Honda Civic! Robot included.
GOOD LUCK to all the teams going to this event.

[KathieK]

Be sure to update all of us on how the tournament went!

[chris L]

id just like to let everybody know that team simbotics #268
had won first place in delaware for vex!!!!!

[Ken Delaney 357]

Radnor Robotics(#55) would like to thank our alliance partners Team 268 and Team 102 for being great partners on the way to winning the Delaware Regional FIRST VEX Challenge. We would also like to thank Lou, Joe and John and all their volunteers and sponsors for putting on a great event. Having three separate events running simultaneously is a huge undertaking and you guys did an awesome job. I don't know if we will make it to Atlanta, we wish all of you guys good luck. I would also like to comment on how much gracious professionalism that was shown by all the teams, while the bugs of the tournament got worked out. I can't wait till next year.

I was wondering if I could get a copy of the official match results.
Thanks

[Mr MOE]

Thanks to everyone (volunteers, teams, spectators) who made the Delaware Regional FIRST Vex Challenge a huge success. With 54 JFLL teams, 54 FLL teams, and 21 FVC teams, the Bob Carpenter Center at the University of Delaware was a rocking place!

Congratulations to each FVC team that participated in this event. This pilot wasn't without a few blips. Thanks for being so gracious throughout. There was some fierce competition and some great energy.

The planning team is getting some much needed rest (setting up the event starting at 10pm Friday after a University of Delaware women's basketball game ), but we will get some results up on the event website sometime this week.

[Bill Moore]

Originally Posted by Mr MOE

Thanks to everyone (volunteers, teams, spectators) who made the Delaware Regional FIRST Vex Challenge a huge success. With 54 JFLL teams, 54 FLL teams, and 21 FVC teams, the Bob Carpenter Center at the University of Delaware was a rocking place!

Congratulations to each FVC team that participated in this event. This pilot wasn't without a few blips. Thanks for being so gracious throughout. There was some fierce competition and some great energy.

The planning team is getting some much needed rest (setting up the event starting at 10pm Friday after a University of Delaware women's basketball game ), but we will get some results up on the event website sometime this week.

Delaware Regional Tournament Vex Results are posted here. The tournament was quite international, with teams from Canada and Singapore joining teams from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Delaware.

We had great fun hosting, and we hope all teams enjoyed the competition! Congratulations to all the participants!

[rubicondsrv]

Originally Posted by Mr MOE

congratulations to each FVC team that participated in this event. This pilot wasn't without a few blips.

Do you know anything about the random radio glitches that were occuring throughout the Tournamnent. We lost at least one round to these glitches.
(robot would go nuts and move randomly without input from controllers)
we reladed our firmware and it did not help.

[Stu Bloom]

How about some video ... someone must have been filming ...

[Bill Moore]

Originally Posted by Stu Bloom

How about some video ... someone must have been filming ...

Everything takes time. We will try to honor requests for photos and video as we recover and continue with our other responsibilities, principal being to get our FRC robot completed and tweaked.

Saturday was not just a Vex Tournament, but FLL and JFLL held tournaments simultaneously with Vex. Over 120 total FIRST teams were at the arena competing. (I believe 120+ teams is the largest single day FIRST event ever.) Setup could only be done after 10:00 PM on Friday, due to a UofD basketball game that evening. Many volunteers had 2 - 3 hours of sleep that evening, before they had to return to help run the event at 6:30 Saturday morning, and they had to stay and break down the setup Saturday evening after the competition.

Without the help of volunteers, not just from our team, but from other FRC teams and organizations, this tournament would not be the enjoyable experience that teams expect when they attend an Official FIRST tournament. We are grateful for the dedication these volunteers have for the students involved in the FIRST programs. Thank you to all who contributed to make these events a success!

We will continue to post in this thread as we add items from the tournament.

[one2bezoned]

I would just like to say thanks to everyone that helped out at the event this weekend. Though I wish we would have won the winning alliance was amazing and I hope we get a chance to go to nationals so we can meet up with them again.

[Mr MOE]

Originally Posted by one2bezoned

I would just like to say thanks to everyone that helped out at the event this weekend. Though I wish we would have won the winning alliance was amazing and I hope we get a chance to go to nationals so we can meet up with them again.

We are working to have the final video compilation put together by MOE alum Jake Warren up on the website soon.

Regarding the radio blips - while we are not 100% certain, we believe they were due to teams in the queue getting similar crystals to teams on the playing fields. When the queued teams inserted their crystals and turned their robots on, it interfered with teams already on the field.

Again, this is speculation. If anyone has any additional info, please share. As a pilot, we expected some issues. We hope all teams that were affected by these type of issues understand that many people were working very hard to identify and correct problems as they came up. From our vantage point, teams were VERY GRACIOUS AND PROFESSIONAL the whole day.

Thanks.

[Bill Moore]

Originally Posted by one2bezoned

I would just like to say thanks to everyone that helped out at the event this weekend. Though I wish we would have won the winning alliance was amazing and I hope we get a chance to go to nationals so we can meet up with them again.

one2bezoned,

If you want to go to the Championship, make sure your mentor gets your team entered in the Lottery to be held on January 31st. Information is in the FIRST Vex Challenge Elegibility document.

There are guaranteed to be 14 open spots. Hope you get one!

[one2bezoned]

Thanks Moe, signed up when Karen Smith sent me an email in december sometime. I must say the Volunteers at this regional are some of the best i had ever seen at a FIRST sponsored event. Congrats to everyone who was apart of it.

[Rich Kressly]

First off, congrats to the plannning committee for pulling off one of the best events I've ever been to. JFLL, FLL, and FVC (over 130 teams total) under one roof at the same time - amazing. Lou Rosanio, John Larock, Joe Perrotto, MOE 365, and a host of volunteers should all be very proud of the outcome.

As for the radio glitches that occured in the morning, we now know this:
Three of the competition crystals did not function correctly and were tested after the competition. Testing indicates that one was mislabeled at the factory and two were "dead". By lunch time at the competition, those crystals were identified and removed from the mix and a pre-match crystal check was instituted. To the best of everyone's knowledge this did affect a robot in each of three matches. Local event volunteers and FIRST FVC staff worked together throughout the day solving problems effectively.

In the cases a robots running after match shutoff, etc. there is no definitive answer at this point, but software/code could be a culprit since multiple hardware configurations yielded the same issues.

We have not confirmed that untethered practicing robots interefered with the field and it's highly unlikely this could occur. The crystals that were used on the competition field are not currently available to the public for purchase. Any crystal a team could have used in the pit area couldn't have matched one on the field. The reason that practicing/pit area robots had to be on tether was to keep them from interfering with one another, the field itself was not of concern.

It's important to note that the number of glitches was far outweighed by incredible competition and gracious professionalism on the part of the FVC teams. All of the teams affected by these anomolies made it to the elimiation rounds and two of them were in the finals. We were all glad to see that none of these technical issues had a major negative impact. For a pilot season, FVC is really an exciting experience and the technical lessons learned in Delaware will certainly make the next FVC events that much better.