Bill's Blog 6/15/11: "What percent of viewers read the title?"

[thefro526]

Good Afternoon Teams,

I’ve finished my first pass of the end of the season survey (my thanks to everyone who participated) and I’ve started to distribute the detailed answers to other departments to help them in future planning. Here’s some of what teams had to say:
76.5% of respondents liked the inclusion of a mini-bot in LOGO MOTION
69.6% of respondents would like to see some sort of mini-bot included in future FRC games (I have no comment on how soon that might materialize)
80.8% of respondents chose the quantity of qualification rounds (more rounds) over increasing the length of individual qualification rounds (more time spent on the field)
60.8% of respondents prefer giving teams a fixed amount of time to connect to the field over reducing the number of rounds in order to build in time so that all teams may connect to the field
A surprising 23.2% of respondents told us participating in more than one competition event a season would be a burden.
Human Resources tells me we’ve already received 5 applications for the new FRC Engineer position. If you’re interested, contact HR soon.

Summer hours start for the office staff in Manchester June 20th. We’re all still putting in full work weeks, but most of us are working longer days Monday through Thursday so we can get out earlier on Fridays. We will have a limited staff in the building on Friday afternoons, so please plan ahead if you need to contact someone.

206 days until the 2012 kickoff
See you then

Some interesting stats in that post.

http://frcdirector.blogspot.com/2011...ead-title.html

[sgreco]

I'm with the majority on all of these points, but I really don't want to see a 'mini-robot' ever again unless the quality of Tetrix motors increases significantly. The limited number of legal parts also limited variation in a lot of cases.

I like the limited time to connect to the field, but I hope they would leave some exceptions for extra time; I know I have been in the player station when lack of communication wasn't the teams' fault.

I hope they're getting good information from the surveys (I also wish I was old enough to apply for the engineering position)

[Duke461]

Originally Posted by sgreco

I'm with the majority on all of these points, but I really don't want to see a 'mini-robot' ever again unless the quality of Tetrix motors increases significantly. The limited number of legal parts also limited variation in a lot of cases.

I agree unless the mini-bot game is vastly different than logomotion's.

[BrendanB]

Hmmm. I am not a fan of a fixed time to connect to the field depending on how long that is. Our robot this year seemed to take it's time to connect and as much as I'm sure everyone would love to check it off that they'd rather have a fixed time over less rounds. I'm sure 100% of them would hate to be on that end of the stick that gets disabled for not connecting when a split second later you can connect (which happened to us twice right as they were going to move on without us) especially in key matches. It depends if this time is 2 minutes or 5 minutes?

I'm just curious, why are planning on either reducing matches or a fixed time when several events have finished on time or early and out of the ones who finished late was it the robots that caused the problem or the flow on and off the field?

Not complaining I'm more wondering why.

[Andy Grady]

60.8% of respondents prefer giving teams a fixed amount of time to connect to the field over reducing the number of rounds in order to build in time so that all teams may connect to the field...

Are you serious?

I would love to know the percentage of that 60.8% which have been bypassed in a qualification round.

Maybe its just because I grew up in a time where you had 5 seeding matches instead of 10, but I would happily give up a couple of matches if it meant my team would not be bypassed for something that could most likely be fixed.

60.8 percent...that just infuriates me...

[DonRotolo]

I would accept a fixed time to "get ready to play", but ONLY if a solution to the variable time it takes to connect to the field is presented. That is, if your robot takes 3 minutes to connect, but if you do this it will be faster, then OK; otherwise if we have no control over the time it takes then I cannot support it.

On the other hand, I like summer hours!

[linuxboy]

I am not a fan of the fixed time either. I had the pleasure of FTAAing two off-seasons. Some matches we were able to start very quickly others took a very long time. Sometimes the problems are with the field, sometimes with the robot, sometimes there are just problems. In a perfect world this would work however it would make the field staff's lives more stressful (in my opinion at least). If there are problems with a robot connecting everyone is trying to get it working as quickly as possible, if the problem can't be fixed, the match will be started, if it can be fixed it will be done in a timely way, giving the teams and field staff a timer to when they have to start the match just stresses everyone out more, not a good idea in my opinion.

My $0.02, make what you will of it.

[GaryVoshol]

How about an option of, "Provide a control system that connects 95% of the time in less than X seconds"? (X a relatively small number, say 10.)

[Jared Russell]

Everybody at the event just poured 6+ weeks of themselves into building a robot. We seriously want to systematically bypass said robots so somebody can go home a few minutes earlier?

Taking a long time to connect to the field is a problem for NI and FIRST to figure out. Don't take it out on the teams.

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

How about an option of, "Provide a control system that connects 95% of the time in less than X seconds"? (X a relatively small number, say 10.)

Realistically, It wouldn't even have to be that fast. Load-in an intros usually take a minimum of two minutes, so I (And I'd be most people) would be happy with a control system that connects 100% of the time in less than 50-60 seconds.

[apalrd]

Originally Posted by thefro526

Realistically, It wouldn't even have to be that fast. Load-in an intros usually take a minimum of two minutes, so I (And I'd be most people) would be happy with a control system that connects 100% of the time in less than 50-60 seconds.

The current radio (2011) takes approximately 2 minutes to boot up and connect to the field. If they expect us to be ready in, say, 3 minutes, this is far too long to wait.
The previous Linksys gaming adapter (2009-2010) was slightly faster, I don't know exactly how much faster.
The IFI system (2000-2008) could boot up and establish a radio connection in 5 seconds, always.

[Billfred]

I'm okay with there being a time limit on it, provided that time limit is reasonable for the system. (The question phrased it as "fixed", not "short", and posed it against the alternative of having fewer matches in a period of time.) If FIRST can get a good data set here, calculating an appropriate threshold (90th percentile of experimentally-obtained robot sync times? 95th? 99th?) should be simple.

I'm also okay with minibots, just not necessarily the speed-at-all-$70-costs scenario presented this year. If future minibots ran within the motors' design envelopes competitively, all is well. (I'd also like to see them add LEGO into the mix; most FLL teams have gotten through competitions by the start of regionals, which would liberate some NXT controllers/motors/sensors.)

The 23.2% of teams that said going to more than one event would be a burden have me curious. I would be very interested in seeing if there was a correlation between teams holding that view and teams achieving success in FRC (for any reasonable definition of "success").

[Francis-134]

Every team at each event paid at least $4000 to attend. Bypassing a team should always be a last resort. We are your customers, FIRST.

This year, we were never bypassed. However, we did experience a couple of variant behaviors that appeared and disappeared without any change in the robot hardware or software. All that had to happen to get the robot working was to wait, and it seemingly magically connected.

But apparently, I am in a minority. Would anyone in the community who is in favor of bypassing robots to stay on a more aggressive schedule like to comment?

[linuxboy]

Originally Posted by apalrd

The current radio (2011) takes approximately 2 minutes to boot up and connect to the field. If they expect us to be ready in, say, 3 minutes, this is far too long to wait.
The previous Linksys gaming adapter (2009-2010) was slightly faster, I don't know exactly how much faster.
The IFI system (2000-2008) could boot up and establish a radio connection in 5 seconds, always.

In my experience it only took 50 seconds on average and a max of 1 minute and ten seconds but when your waiting to start a match even that seems like a while. If that could be faster I think that would make the fixed time a little better but still it seems like that fixed time would require everything to work right the first time

[rsisk]

Regarding the fixed time to connect to the field, why should that be anything but a decision to be made by the FTA? Isn't that why they are there, to deal with these kind of issues?

I'm glad to see that ~77% do not find a second regional to be a burden. Our team is working in that direction, but are not there yet, either financially or time wise. I would still consider our team a success. Our students are still working hard to learn more about engineering, running a team, mentoring other teams, social skills, and all those other things that FIRST brings to the table. Success on the field? Eh, that's coming.