2012 Match Initial Observations

[kborer22]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

The NBA it is not.
That 0-0 match was brutal and I think there's gonna be some pretty agonizing qualification matches (or even whole regionals) this year but at least the quality of play picked up exponentially during the elims. It looks like autonomous and the ability to get up on the ramp can make or break alliances. Not much in the way of defense but I doubt teams like 23 and 125 are gonna be allowed to make a living parking in front of the basket and popping balls in at their leisure all day long especially in St. Louis.

Don't you worry 125 will be able to shoot from wherever we need to....

Yesterday was all manual alignment, shooter speed, and hood angle for us, our drivers did great. We apparently had a bad Ethernet cable to the camera, oh well.

The biggest things I took away from yesterday:
1. Balls under the bridge is a huge issue
2. Teams looking to track penalties in scouting will be nearly impossible
3, balancing on bridges seems sketchy for now, once teams have more practice it should be fine
4. Hopefully they fix the fenders, the red fender at suffield was completely dislodged several times
5. Teams were inconsistent at best from the key, this should improve
6. Defense seemed useless. we parked in front of the fender and teams were able to back up to the key. Also, the high risk of penalties hardly seems worth getting anywhere near a robot shooting from the key. Well see how it plays out

[MarcD79]

@ kborer22; I agree there were some issues, but we all expect some at Suffield. The red fender was missing the velcro at the bottom. We knew but had no vecro to correct the problem. The ball issue was noticed right away & relayed to FIRST. As the day went on there were less instances of balls under the bridges. I guess the teams recognized this and adjusted their strategy. As for the rest of what you said about shooting from the fenders & balancing act. I will go out on the line & say everybody learned valuable information & will only improve dramatically from this. They also had that issue when we stopped round #3 in Hybrid. When the stop button was pushed, it caused a loss of info for the AP (access point) & had to be corrected. Again, FIRST was advised of this. The reason was that the bridge supports were not removed. They didn't pause the round for fear of the robots being caught up in a continuous Hybrid loop & unable to stop. As always there are things learned that are not thought of during planning each year. Life is a continued lesson & we never stop learning. We just roll with it. I am happy with how yesterday went & am looking forward to Hartford Regional.