Happy about Field problems & people management & severe weather @ Championship

[torihoelscher]

I am glad that we didnt panic. I was texted by a friend that said we are in a tornado warning and then I was told that the other team representative and I need to get up to the stands (we were on the floor watching Einstein matches). We walked over where a group of people were standing and glanced outside. The weather was insane! A weather lover like myself, who has an obsession with storms and all that jazz, was in complete awe! We ended up getting in the stands by going near the Galileo field. I could hear the tornado Siren over the music and the hail didnt help.

With the technical issues Einstein was having, maybe the frequency from the lightning caused some of these issues. I think thats something we should all consider. I liked how they dealt with the issues. They waited for a little bit and then said we are going to start with a clean slate. I dont recall anymore issues but I know Robonauts and other teams were having issues for the longest time.

With the frequency of the lightning even Wi-fi and etc has issues! (coming from Florida, my home's wireless has issues when we have a lot of lightning in the area)

I am extremely grateful that we didnt have a twister on the ground. That wouldve stressed everyone out to the extreme.

Also how everyone handled the Finale party, was awesome! The City Museum was so COOL but extremely claustrophobic! lol

[dtengineering]

While I wouldn't necessarily use the term "happy about field problems", I get your point. Given the situation it doesn't seem like there was much else FIRST could do.

I would also like to thank the teams that played on Einstein for their gracious response to the unforunate situation that resulted from the field failures. I know what it is like to have your playoff run cut short due to an unexplained error that you could not replicate on a robot than ran perfectly throughout an entire event (admittedly, it wasn't on Einstein, but it was significant to us). When that happened to my team, however, it was easily passed off as a robot failure (maybe they were right... who knows... the tournament moved on and no one investigated). I think that has happened several times and to several teams over the years at several events. It is only now that the problem has occurred on Einstein that FIRST has to admit that either the field had issues, or that the very best teams on the planet can't figure out how to get their robot to work reliably.

So thank you to the teams on Einstein... you had to sacrifice some of the most exciting matches of your lives... but maybe that will finally cause the root cause of the problem to be solved. I suspect that when it is, we will discover that Einstein was not a fluke and that there were warning signals leading up to it.*

Thank you to the people volunteers and FIRST staff who worked so hard to get those systems running. Thank you to FIRST for being up front, identifying that there was a problem, and doing everything you can to (finally?) get it fixed.

So yeah, I wouldn't say I was "happy about the field problems", but I will say that I will be overjoyed if this means that we come closer to having a perfectly reliable field/robot communication system.

Jason

*and is that ever a good engineering lesson... many catastrophic failures have been presaged by minor, niggling concerns that were easy to overlook