2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by IndySam

As far as I know the balls were all from the same manufacture and the same lot.

The side of very single box of balls I ever looked at bore the label "box n of 1,111". It's possible that they were from separate production runs, but they were obviously all shipped at the same time.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Libby K

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...

Only half joking with this....

We're a robotics competition with robots that have boom arms?
I once showed Team 11's boom arm robot to a video webcasting company and they were MIGHTY interested in getting close to it. I think someone might be able to put 2 and 2 together with that.

We're also a competition with fields we provide. Fields that could be outfitted with video equipment that is stationary.

Still have equipment cost and setup time, but it doesn't all have to be cinematic wizardry.

[rees2001]

Originally Posted by Dad1279

1) Follow and enforce the rules that are in place. If teams are expected to follow the rules, as should field personnel, inspectors, and volunteers.
2) Don't ignore the students.
Multiple times our students questioned a situation that did not agree with rules and procedures published, and were either ridiculed or ignored.

Respect from the field personnel is a huge one for me. At one of our regional competitions the announcer saw a ref make an incorrect call in regards to driving through the key being a penalty. He commented on it in his play by play and the ref changed his call. This was after 4 straight matches a student tried to alert the head ref that the penalty was being called incorrectly by that ref and they were all ignored.
At championship my students were told by the head ref that since we designed our bumpers to be at the lowest position we designed it so other teams could drive onto us and that it is our fault that our robot was damaged by the other robot driving into our robot. He actually told the student that “it is pretty funny how they drove into you.” Unacceptable!

Originally Posted by 1075guy

A few things:
Someone mentioned earlier in the thread the matchmaking algorithm. It patently doesn't suck. It's a very complex multidimensional matrix problem, and it does a very good job at producing a 'fair' schedule. It makes an assumption that all teams are equal in power, and thus, a given schedule will be 'harder' or 'easier' for some teams. It has a large number of parameters which can be set, including minimum match separation and so on. There's a well written paper explaining exactly how it works. Someone can provide a link I'm sure.

It was me that commented on the schedule. I know it doesn’t “suck”. I know it is difficult to put together. I was told by a reliable source that he ran some data and our team had the toughest schedule at championship. I suppose somebody has to get the toughest schedule, but it would seem like it would be someone that ends up ranked in the bottom ¼ not the top 1/3.

I would also agree with the posters that felt there should have been a glossary and better Q&A responses. Please just answer the questions like you are responding to a stakeholder in your organization, because you are.

I have posted in the positive thread, how about you?

[Jared Russell]

On the topic of balls...

There is no doubt in my mind that the balls introduced for Eliminations on Saturday were significantly different than any other balls we had played with all season. Our team had been to four District and Regional events prior to Championships, and the balls we encountered at all four (and the first two days on Curie) were relatively the same. Sure, there was a bit of variability from one ball to the next, and new balls always came out for Eliminations, but once we dialed in our shooter we never had to do it again (astute observers will notice that Miss Daisy's accuracy always degraded a bit towards the end of Qualifications at all of our events, but suddenly got a lot better in Eliminations. We tuned our shooter for Elimination balls and deliberately did not play the game of trying to react to old balls, since we knew the rounds that counted would have new ones).

After lunch, however, the balls that were put out felt SIGNIFICANTLY different. Not only were they somewhat squishier, their surface texture was very different than what we had seen before. In fact, the balls felt a LOT like the balls our team had purchased directly from Gopher (without the FIRST logo) right after kickoff. We ended up ditching the manufacturer's balls simply because they handled so much differently from the FIRST-logo balls.

We and many other teams had difficulty handling the new balls. They stuck to each other and just about any other surface they touched like no other balls did. I observed or have heard about AT LEAST the following teams having some sort of jamming or shooting accuracy problems during Eliminations: 341, 987, 1986, 254, 1477, 330. The most common culprit was that balls would "climb" each other in conveyor systems, or not want to funnel from N-to-1 between intakes and feeder systems. In other cases, the increased "stickiness" of the balls caused them to drag significantly in single-file conveyors.

Were these balls from the same batch? I do not know, but I doubt it. If they were, perhaps they were stored in environmental conditions that changed the surface texture of the balls (FIRST really needs to invest in a game-piece humidor ). I just wish they would have introduced the balls earlier so that teams could have reacted.

[Clinton Bolinger]

Originally Posted by Libby K

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...

Originally Posted by thefro526

Doesn't FIRST Contract an AV Company for Non-District Events? Wouldn't it be as simple as asking them (and compensating them appropriately) to webcast and archive the event?

Breaking the video into individual matches would be a little more involved - but if it's something truly important to FIRST then it's probably worth hiring a person or two that manages these archived videos - even if they're only two to three month Temp employees for the competition season.

Our team has been archiving match videos in Michigan for 2 years now. We have each match uploaded to YouTube with in 5 minutes after the match is over. We also add tags to each match that has the team numbers (frc2337) that are playing in the match, as well as, an exact match tag (2012gl_qf4m2)

What we use to pull this off:
- 1 Person
- 1 Laptop
- Internet
- Video and Audio Feed

I feel that if a medium size team can do this at events they attend, FIRST should be able to pull this off even easier. FIRST has access to the FMS, internet, and Video Feeds allowing for them to automate the system even more. Also I think one of the 20 volunteers that guard the entrance to the pits, watching for people with out safety glasses, could easily perform this task.

If FIRST wants more people to see what we are doing, I think that archive all of the matches for all of the events on YouTube is a step in the right direction.

If anyone at FIRST would like to talk to use about how we archive matches we would be more then happy to share what we have learned.

-Clinton-

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by sircedric4

I am pretty sure the reason they do speeches during Einstein is to give the robots a chance to cool down and for the teams to perform maintenance/battery changes on the robots between matches.

So its either speeches that are gonna be made one way or the other, or another 5 minutes of dancing to Cotton Eye Joe.

I remain... unconvinced that robots need more cool-down and battery change time on Einstein then they do during division (or regional) tournaments. 2+ hours to play at most six 2.25-minute matches is more than a bit much. If you don't have a personal investment in a team on the field, the finals are downright boring.

Please note that I'm not saying this to whine, I'm saying it as a suggested improvement if FIRST truly wants to become a popular culture, spectator phenomenon that actually transforms the culture. FIRST has clearly embraced the realization that the games themselves must be fun to watch even for people who are not on a team; they just need to apply the same reasoning to Einstein.

IMO, of course.

[Jim Zondag]

Originally Posted by Jared341

On the topic of balls...

There is no doubt in my mind that the balls introduced for Eliminations on Saturday were significantly different than any other balls we had played with all season.

Team 33 experienced the same thing on Galileo. We thought that the new balls put in for Elims felt very different and our alliance missed most of the Hybrid shots.
The error appear larger than what we had seen before at any of the other events, so it did seem that these ball may have been 'more different'. There will always be variables outside of the control of the teams, and playing peice variablity is always one of these. I think that dealing with ball variablitity was our biggest challenge in developing the robot this year.

[Craig Roys]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Team 33 experienced the same thing on Galileo. We thought that the new balls put in for Elims felt very different and our alliance missed most of the Hybrid shots.
The error appear larger than what we had seen before at any of the other events, so it did seem that these ball may have been 'more different'. There will always be variables outside of the control of the teams, and playing peice variablity is always one of these. I think that dealing with ball variablitity was our biggest challenge in developing the robot this year.

We dealt with the same issue. Prior to the Galileo eliminations, we were able to deal with new balls being cycled in - we had the ability to slow down our shooter from the driver station, plus we got a pretty good idea of where we needed to park with new balls. The new balls on Galileo went much further than any others we experienced - this was with the shooter turned down and parked at the very back of the key. Not to mention that we knelt on, jumped up and down on, compressed the balls as much as possible before the match - didn't seem to do much good.

We have a couple of things that we want to try for the offseason to try to get more consistency between new and old balls. We'll probably get it figured out just as all the competitions are over and we need to start planning for next year.

[Thad House]

On Archimedes towards the ends of the qualifications there were some VERY HARD balls put onto the field. With out hands they were uncompressable. During the match we grabbed it, and it got jammed in our shooter because it couldnt compress. and shut down our shooting that match

[Craig Roys]

Originally Posted by Jared341

After lunch, however, the balls that were put out felt SIGNIFICANTLY different. Not only were they somewhat squishier, their surface texture was very different than what we had seen before. In fact, the balls felt a LOT like the balls our team had purchased directly from Gopher (without the FIRST logo) right after kickoff. We ended up ditching the manufacturer's balls simply because they handled so much differently from the FIRST-logo balls.

We and many other teams had difficulty handling the new balls. They stuck to each other and just about any other surface they touched like no other balls did. I observed or have heard about AT LEAST the following teams having some sort of jamming or shooting accuracy problems during Eliminations: 341, 987, 1986, 254, 1477, 330. The most common culprit was that balls would "climb" each other in conveyor systems, or not want to funnel from N-to-1 between intakes and feeder systems. In other cases, the increased "stickiness" of the balls caused them to drag significantly in single-file conveyors.

Were these balls from the same batch? I do not know, but I doubt it. If they were, perhaps they were stored in environmental conditions that changed the surface texture of the balls (FIRST really needs to invest in a game-piece humidor ). I just wish they would have introduced the balls earlier so that teams could have reacted.

We noticed the "climbing" during our last match of quals on Saturday morning...we pulled 2 balls off the alliance bridge and they came in right next to each other. When we tried to shoot they jammed up - normally we could fix this by reversing the rollers, but they just jammed in that direction too. It took us 30-45 seconds to finally de-jam them so we could shoot again. By then it was time to head to the coop bridge. It did seem they were more sticky or something.

[mwmac]

Stick + dead horse = this post...Names of involved parties will not be revealed, they can speak for themselves if they wish to jump in...

Just prior to the beginning of our elimination matches a team approached us in the pits to show us a ball that had just jammed in their bot on the Newton field. It was a slightly different shade of orange (no problem), felt significantly firmer (problem?), significantly different in surface friction characteristics (problem?) and, according to the team with the ball, weighed 2+ oz more than the kop balls. Our physical comparisons were to a brand new ball purchased at the First store. Both balls were taken to First officiating personnel for explanation of the change in balls. We were then advised that a mixture of both type of balls would be used in elims in approximately a 50/50 mix.

No bellyaching or crybabies here but we did experience our first ball jams of the champs in eliminations, one in hybrid and one in teleop. In quali's we had almost 100% 4 ball hybrid to this point. We were able to clear one jam the other rendered us unable to shoot for the remainder of the match.

Purpose of the post is to confirm from personal observation that balls introduced in elims were significantly different in key characteristics and to urge First to address this matter in the future.

Ball horse is well and truly dead to this observer...

[rsisk]

I wish they would bring back the opening parade at Championship. It last happened in 2010 in Atlanta (IIRC).

All of the mascots, and high school bands would march around the arena and really just pump the energy levels about a million times. It was a pretty cool way to open the event.

[BJC]

Originally Posted by Jim Zondag

Team 33 experienced the same thing on Galileo. We thought that the new balls put in for Elims felt very different and our alliance missed most of the Hybrid shots.
The error appear larger than what we had seen before at any of the other events, so it did seem that these ball may have been 'more different'. There will always be variables outside of the control of the teams, and playing peice variablity is always one of these. I think that dealing with ball variablitity was our biggest challenge in developing the robot this year.

Jim, don't forget the elim's match where we had a ball jam up in the collector. (which had never happened before.) I thought it was just really bad luck at the time, but now I think it could have been that the balls were actually different from the rest of the season.

[Mr B]

Something I haven't seen posted here is the issue of Bag and Tag robots. Well funded teams simply build two robots, one for competition and one for practice and software development. Teams with less cabbage have to make do with a single robot, and hope that they can make it work at the event. (That or bend the rules and keep working after ship. Given the sheer number of teams, it likely happens.) If we lose the bag and tag requirements, things are greatly simplified, and up-and-comers can be more competitive. Yes, there will be teams that will change their whole robot between events, but the overall quality of competition will skyrocket.

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Mr B

Something I haven't seen posted here is the issue of Bag and Tag robots. Well funded teams simply build two robots, one for competition and one for practice and software development. Teams with less cabbage have to make do with a single robot, and hope that they can make it work at the event. (That or bend the rules and keep working after ship. Given the sheer number of teams, it likely happens.) If we lose the bag and tag requirements, things are greatly simplified, and up-and-comers can be more competitive. Yes, there will be teams that will change their whole robot between events, but the overall quality of competition will skyrocket.

The other problem with the bag and tag system is that at MAR Mount Olive our entire supply of bags and tags in spare parts was 1. I would know, I was the guy in charge of the spare parts at the event.

That made for a nice close to the event as teams realized that when their robot got to the next event they'd not have the 'official' bag or tags.

It resulted in not one, but two calls to FIRST HQ to make absolutely sure that they'd not get caught in paperwork on that when they got to the other end.