FRC Blogged - Lightning

[Kristian Calhoun]

FRC Blogged - Lightning

Hello Teams,

OK, fourth blog this week – a possible record. I had been holding off on this one until we had a quiet week, but that may be never, so here goes.

It took a mountain of information to put together the Einstein report. The digital folder we are using to store all this information ‘weighs in’ at over 800 MB. This includes everything from team reports and code, to expert feedback, to data logs, and more. It also includes what I think is an interesting report on the lightning we had near the venue while the matches were going on. The Einstein report notes there was a possibility that an external RF event could have caused one of the shorter disruptions we saw. We didn’t have enough information to say ‘yes, it was the lightning’, but I wanted to share the report we reviewed. You can find it here. If you count them up, you’ll see we had about 600 lightning strokes within a 10 mile radius of the dome during the three hours of the closing ceremonies (the report itself covers a longer time period, that’s why it lists 1,201 strokes) .

One more note – this report is copyrighted by the Vaisala Group, but we got special permission to share it with you here.

I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend.

Frank

[ehochstein]

There is a very interesting comment posted by Frank -

Hi Conor. I hope the email address for feedback isn't a mystery! It's 2012frcfeedback@usfirst.org. If you're referring to the fact that folks aren't getting replies, as Jon said in his note introducing the Einstein report, you should not necessarily expect a direct response. However, I promise you every email is getting reviewed. We recognize this system is not ideal, and we are working on improvements. Also, it's my intent to produce a follow-up report to the initial Einstein report showing our progress. Believe me, we are very busy with all this.

[Joon Park]

A follow up report! Huge props to FIRST HQ for dealing with this in such a professional and helpful way to the FRC community at large.