[FRC Blog] Einstein Report Released

[PayneTrain]

The organization did what they were expected to by members of the FRC community and more, even with the news arising that intentional interference took place. my eyes really widened when I read that. I'll finish it after I let that thought sink in.

It would have been a poor option to take away the award from the kids and their organizations that support them, but it's great that they extended the berths to all teams on Einstein and paid for the teams to register in 2013.

[davidthefat]

ಠ_ಠ So, asides from the intentional foul play, it seems as if their was a lot of errors on the teams themselves. Seems like 987's problem was that there was a deadlock with their software. So, that's a shame.

[Akash Rastogi]

I think it is important to remind readers to not be too shocked and awed by the fact that interference happened; I think it should be viewed as another thing that is potentially a problem with the control system.

My point being; don't let this news be the face of the issues with the control system. The fact that these elite teams were able to have such problems with the system leads me to say that perhaps this is not the ideal system for FRC.

This report is great and revealed many problems teams may have dealt with all season.

+0.02

[ttldomination]

Originally Posted by dodar

After reading through this, I believe FIRST should either replay the matches or declare no champions this year and allow all 12 teams free payment for next year's championship.

I don't know if you are joking or not, but the ramifications of this would be ugly, at best. The current step was the correct one.

Originally Posted by linuxboy

I believe Bill mentioned that the NI contract will be up for the 2015 season.

- Oliver

Meh, teams have thousands of dollars of control system laying around. If we must, then I suppose we'll go to a new system, but only if we really have to.

Time to read the detailed report,
Sunny G.

[bearbot]

WOW thanks you to FIRST for releasing this out to everybody I appauled that it hopefully wont happen again.We had major issues with the FMS @ Cheaspeake regional and saw they were used on Einsten field to.Whish FIRST would have done something to the fields that the electronics came from to instead of just from the Einsten matches

[Racer26]

Wow. Intentional interference. Shame they decided to let the results stand after that. I'm sure 1114/2056/4334 are left with a rather sour taste in their mouths.

I read the whole report, and while a number of possible issues were identified for the various teams, only 118's dropouts were really confirmed to be caused by team equipment/configuration.

I will say that for the FCA attacks on 1114/2056/4334 to be intentional, someone would have had to have figured out that the FCA vulnerability existed, and based on the way the report talks of it, it seems that this only existed from Wk4->Championship, and only on robots with rev A hardware. Curious, indeed.

I still stand by my original assessment from April that the proper way for FIRST to have handled Einstein is to award all 12 teams 2012 FRC Champions, in lieu of being able to play a fair set of matches.

[Joon Park]

I am just as shocked about the intentional interference as everyone else is, but I really would like to extend sincere thanks to the twelve teams, the volunteers, the experts, and most importantly to FIRST and FRC for taking the time to deal with this in such a professional and thorough way.

[JB987]

Originally Posted by davidthefat

ಠ_ಠ So, asides from the intentional foul play, it seems as if their was a lot of errors on the teams themselves. Seems like 987's problem was that there was a deadlock with their software. So, that's a shame.

David,
If you read the full report carefully and pay close attention to the following:

987 – While testing of this robot revealed programming issues that could cause higher than normal trip
times, or the cRIO controller user code to lock up, none of these issues were found to cause a command response failure. Which was the cause of our "dead" time on the field). The duration of these losses were too short to be attributed to a cRIO or robot radio
reboot, but fit well with the symptoms of failed client authentication.

You will see that we too were likely victims of the intentional"failed client authorization" debacle...

[davidthefat]

Originally Posted by JB987

David,
If you read the full report carefully and pay close attention to the following:

987 – While testing of this robot revealed programming issues that could cause higher than normal trip
times, or the cRIO controller user code to lock up, none of these issues were found to cause a command response failure. Which was the cause of our "dead" time on the field). The duration of these losses were too short to be attributed to a cRIO or robot radio
reboot, but fit well with the symptoms of failed client authentication.

You will see that we too were likely victims of the intentional"failed client authorization" debacle...

Yes, I admit, I have not read carefully enough. Still, that's a shame IMHO. A deadlock anywhere is not good.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

Wow. Intentional interference. Shame they decided to let the results stand after that.

Barry Bonds used steroids, however in the record books he is still listed as hitting the most amount of homeruns.

Just thought I'd throw that in for comparison. Also, it isn't known(well, to the general public, i'd assume those involved do know) whether or not the interferer was directly targeting a specific team; just that he was only SEEN targeting 2056 directly.

IMO intentional interference being reasoning to change the results is an invalid point. As stated, FIRST is now more like many varsity sports

Also of interest was that it seems like 118's issue was also code and that no team on Einstein was using Labview. For reference, do 1717 or 469(had comm issues in their semis) use labview?

[Racer26]

Worth noting: I expect the FRC Community at large to be wholly unsatisfied with HQ's decision not to replay the matches (and/or declare all 12 teams Champions in lieu), given the circumstance of intentional foul play.

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by stevend1994

For reference, do 1717 or 469(had comm issues in their semis) use labview?

1717 Did not use labview for sure.

Originally Posted by 1075guy

Worth noting: I expect the FRC Community at large to be wholly unsatisfied with HQ's decision not to replay the matches (and/or declare all 12 teams Champions in lieu), given the circumstance of intentional foul play.

I don't think you can blame FIRST for not replaying the matches... Replaying Einstein 2012 would be asking for trouble. Teams or the community shouldn't be unsatisfied. The alliance of 25/180/16 were darn solid. 25/180 hit their shots and could triple. 16 was by far too freakin amazing at stealing/feeding. And the alliance had a really solid auton/endgame.

Teams and the community should be stoked that FIRST took a giant step forward and are working towards figuring out issues with the control system. They even published a very nice paper. Kudos to FIRST.

-RC

[Radical Pi]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

I will say that for the FCA attacks on 1114/2056/4334 to be intentional, someone would have had to have figured out that the FCA vulnerability existed, and based on the way the report talks of it, it seems that this only existed from Wk4->Championship, and only on robots with rev A hardware. Curious, indeed.

I have a feeling that while there was intentional FCA going on, there's a large potential for unintentional FCA as well, which they didn't mention whether or not had been tested. Many teams configure their practice network at the shop with the same SSIDs that the field uses, and if they used a different security key, any phones/tablets/laptops that happened to be active during the games and had been connected to the network at home could have been attempting connections in the background. I actually caught our team's programming laptop trying this once during week 2.

Also, I was surprised to notice this year that SSID broadcast was enabled on the field APs, making the team networks show up on every laptop in range. I don't remember it being that way last year.

On a somewhat related note, what would people think about having a CSA check over code as part of inspection to counter the kind of user code issues that were seen in the report. It wouldn't have to be a pass/fail kind of thing, but having a more well-trained pair of eyes to provide suggestions to the team and something for field staff to go on when a robot misbehaves would probably go a long way

Anyways, excellent report by FIRST, and I think bandwidth caps are a great idea. I hope they don't take the partial involvement of the BeagleBone as a reason to ban non-KOP electronics though. They really open up new possibilities for teams.

EDIT:

Originally Posted by stevend1994

Also of interest was that it seems like 118's issue was also code and that no team on Einstein was using Labview. For reference, do 1717 or 469(had comm issues in their semis) use labview?

I don't know about those two, but after those semis 68 had unexplained comms issues in the finals, and they do use labview

[whattsheorder]

Impressed by FIRST's response, my faith in FIRST has been restored. So ridiculous what the hacker did though. I'm curious as to what his relations are to FIRST/any teams..

[Basel A]

While I don't think there's a strong case for replay or any change to the officially announced results of the 2012 FRC Championship, I do think it's worth noting that prior to their being knocked out, the Archimedes alliance was the only one suffering problems likely caused by FCA. If the interferer had an agenda, it seems that 1114, 2056, and 4334 was the primary target.