First Official 2012 Game Hint

[EricH]

Originally Posted by thefro526

I tried to find a picture of a 2006 low goal but was unable to. If memory serves me, the goal had 2-3 tunnel like structures for balls to go through, each with it's own photo sensor. Don't think I ever saw one jam up, even when 20-ish balls were dumped in at once.

Single chute with a vision sensor of some form. No jamming, but you had to clear the holding pen before the balls got stuck on the sensor, otherwise they'd count again and again.

Originally Posted by EricH

Single chute with a vision sensor of some form. No jamming, but you had to clear the holding pen before the balls got stuck on the sensor, otherwise they'd count again and again.

And that's a bad thing to keep counting scores?

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by SuperNerd256

And that's a bad thing to keep counting scores?

Your opponent scored on you in 2006 (opposite of 2010). If you didn't clear the ball corral fast enough, the opponents score would keep going up.

Originally Posted by thefro526

Your opponent scored on you in 2006 (opposite of 2010). If you didn't clear the ball corral fast enough, the opponents score would keep going up.

Oh.... :\

[EricH]

There was a match replayed that year... in finals... because the lower goal counted 5 balls too many in automode. 4 high (12 points) versus 10 low (10 points), and 10 low won autonomous (score 15 points). Yes. This was in a regional finals match. The way the game was set up, this screwed up the entire match. After this incident and others like it, a delay to allow for the manual counters to report in was added.

It wasn't the hardware, IIRC, but the software that didn't quite work properly.

[FRC4ME]

Whoa...I think this is the most substantial game hint I've seen. Not a cryptic phrase or an obscure photograph, but a parts list for the field? In a plainly readable format?

This is too easy. It must be a decoy. The real game hint is obviously steganographically encoded in the image. Come on CD'ers, start cracking...

[bhaidet]

Could the "Very high speed" of the counter not refer to how many times it can count in a second but its response time to a change of input? I am not sure exactly how it works, but the high speed may just mean that whatever triggers the sensor (probably photogate) is only blocking the photogate for a short time, meaning that it is small and/or moving fast.

Even launching a few balls into a goal a second is "fast" from the game prospective, but is nothing for a computer (and the parts list had LAN adapters that enabled direct IO, I believe somebody posted.) There must be some reason for FIRST to add extra circuitry between the computer and the sensor. If the network is not fast enough to register a goal with whatever sensor it is, the adding of a "quantizing" counter between them would eliminate this problem.

People said that in Aim High the counters were unreliable, does anyone know why? was it a speed-of-signal-pulse issue?

If used like this, this part seems like it would probably have been inserted as a tweak as the GDC played and tested (and figured that it wouldn't work well without it). I can see it happening.




photogate input: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ._____/\__________

Time the network is looking for a response (when high): ----____----____-

it would not be recorded because the pulse happens when the network is not listening



with the "quantizer"

photogate input: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ._____/\__________
signal to network: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ._____/----\______

Time the network is looking for a response (when high): ----____----____-

this time the signal and the async time the network is "looking" line up, so there will be a score detected.

[ratdude747]

I had an idea:

what if the high speed sensors are used to monitor robots driving though lanes? like a 1-robot-per-lane version of overdrive?

just a thought...

[zaphodp.jensen]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

I had an idea:

what if the high speed sensors are used to monitor robots driving though lanes? like a 1-robot-per-lane version of overdrive?

just a thought...

It would be hard to drive through a lane that was wide enough for only one robot to drive through and long... It was fairly hard to squeeze through in between the tower and the perimeter last year, and that was slightly wider than 1 robot wide, and very narrow...

[rcmolloy]

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

How about the bottlenecks in Aim High? Pokey-pokey stick anyone?

Wasn't around for Aim High, however it looks as if they all funneled into a mesh type netting. I believe that pokey pokey stick helped clear the bunches of balls that were restricted from the netting.

Correct me if I am wrong Gary.

Originally Posted by thefro526

I tried to find a picture of a 2006 low goal but was unable to. If memory serves me, the goal had 2-3 tunnel like structures for balls to go through, each with it's own photo sensor. Don't think I ever saw one jam up, even when 20-ish balls were dumped in at once.

2010's goals were never designed for multiple game pieces to pass through, or at least I don't think they were. It doesn't help that the memory foam made it really easy to jam two balls into the goal pretty tightly.

Dustin,

Like above, never was able to view the 2006 goals even with the internet searches these days. I was just stating that in 2010 there was a certain bottle neck that the balls could eventually go through one by one counting each separately mainly referring to the fact that game pieces will most likely be scored one by one.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Ladder logic n. archaic 1. How to program old stuff, slowly. 2. The 1998 FRC game.

So you can imagine my sense of revulsion when I saw the RSLogix stuff. Fortunately, I think FIRST is going to keep it far from the robots. Its presence implies to me that the game elements need to be processed/scored in a way that occurs too rapidly for humans—hence the sensors and PLC stuff—yet it's important enough to the game that teams will need it after kickoff to test with.

You're aware that RSLogix5000 can use other programming methods, including structured text, right? And I'm curious as to why you'd want FIRST to keep a software package used frequently in industry away from teams, especially if your basis is simply because it uses ladder logic. It's not as if function block programming, as many teams use in LabView, is any better.

I'm curious to how long RSLogix has been used by FIRST HQ.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

You're aware that RSLogix5000 can use other programming methods, including structured text, right? And I'm curious as to why you'd want FIRST to keep a software package used frequently in industry away from teams, especially if your basis is simply because it uses ladder logic. It's not as if function block programming, as many teams use in LabView, is any better.

For all but the simplest tasks, ladder logic is pretty convincingly inferior to other types of programming that are possible on modern PLCs or computers running RTOSs; even for the simplest tasks, it's not universally better. I was going by Chris Elston's post referring to the fact that ladder logic is used on this hardware. If it does support other things, then that's excellent. If the behaviour of the hardware is identical using various programming methods, then that's even better. (So that implementing something in ladder logic wouldn't be necessary to achieving results equivalent to the competition setup. I doubt this is true, though, because most compilers for functional languages optimize automatically, which I have not known to be true for ladder logic—probably by design. Without having seen the application, I don't know if these differences will matter in the slightest.)

Incidentally, being frequently used in industry is not a sufficient reason to encourage teams to try something. Industry does lots of inefficient, uneconomical or otherwise illogical things because it has constraints that don't apply to teams or students learning engineering methods. Furthermore, assuming a finite amount of time to learn industrial techniques, it's not necessarily a good idea to split efforts between platforms.

[HumblePie]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

For all but the simplest tasks, ladder logic is pretty convincingly inferior

I think we're looking at this all wrong........ if ladder logic is so outdated, why include it in the hint? Maybe that's the name of the game "Ladder Logic".... The endgame involves no stairs, no ramps.......it's ladders!:

[PAR_WIG1350]

Originally Posted by FRC4ME

Whoa...I think this is the most substantial game hint I've seen. Not a cryptic phrase or an obscure photograph, but a parts list for the field? In a plainly readable format?

This is too easy. It must be a decoy. The real game hint is obviously steganographically encoded in the image. Come on CD'ers, start cracking...

I did look into stenography even before my first post in this thread (#184), the program was complaining that the file extension was .jpg instead of .JPG, so I gave up.