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

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Francis-134

Basically, I'm trying to understand if adding a time limit to the time it takes for a robot to connect is going to solve any real problems.

Also, the question asked seems oddly worded, i.e. reduce the number of matches you have by building time into the schedule or introducing a connect timer. It's like asking someone if they would like to eat pig slop or chum for dinner; neither option is very good, so why can't we just change the choices?

It's not that teams lost matches or they want to reduce the number of matches. It's the other way around - FIRST wants to add matches.

The problem is that match schedules are being generated with an 8 minute cycle time in anticipation of these connection problems. If they dropped the cycle time to 6 minutes, there could be 25% more matches.

I believe the match schedules used to have a 5 minute cycle time a long time ago.