2013 Washington DC Regional

[Jared Russell]

How does a cRIO suddenly lose its image?

[ToddF]

Beats me. I'm a mechanical guy. It's happened to us before, though. Everything's working, then suddenly not. Re-imaging, or downloading code, or something, fixes the problem. Maybe 2415 will be able to give a better answer as to what truly went wrong. I just happened to be in their pit right after the matches, taking pictures of their awesome floor pickup arm.

[mrmummert]

We had something like that happen at VCU last year...We didn't know if it was
the C-rio or the radio...it cost us a match. We changed both out and kept on going. In 2011 we lost the PDB and did'nt pack a spare....we lost out on two matches before we got a loaner....We learned from that and try to pack two or three spares of everything now This year we had a sidecar go bad at Palmetto....stuff happens. Kyle Johnson (who was a CSA at Palmetto and VCU
this year is a mentor for our team and could probably explain it more if he sees
this.

[ToddF]

A cool thing about this regional, the wild card rule kicks in big time.

The winning alliance is 79, 379, and 383.

79 already won the Orlando Regional, and 379 already won the Queen City Regional. That means that the finalist alliance captain (2415) and first pick (116) get wild card invitations to the Championships. That takes away the sting a bit...

[mrmummert]

116 got E.I. also.....Dave must be very happy tonight.

[MooreteP]

I was so happy to see the Brazilians on the winning alliance after they were overlooked in their visit to Boston last weekend.
They come from so far away and don't have the local team support that we may be able to take advantage of.

Is there more to the story about the alliance selections?

Also glad about the two wildcards.

[ttldomination]

Originally Posted by Jared341

How does a cRIO suddenly lose its image?

This. ? .

Originally Posted by ToddF

A cool thing about this regional, the wild card rule kicks in big time.

The winning alliance is 79, 379, and 383.

79 already won the Orlando Regional, and 379 already won the Queen City Regional. That means that the finalist alliance captain (2415) and first pick (116) get wild card invitations to the Championships. That takes away the sting a bit...

I'm a little rusty on the rules about the wildcard spots, but 2415 already has a championship spot with their Engineering Inspiration award at P'tree. Does this mean that their next team receives that invite?

- Sunny G.

[Robo Hamsters]

Team 4466 would like to thank 1885, I LITE Robotics for graciously helping us by providing us with students for our team when the few students (except my son) that we had decided to quit at the last minute. They were the perfect example of what FIRST is all about. They provided us with 3 students for our drive team as well as students for our pit and mentors to help us out. Without them we would NOT have been able to compete.

The students they had helping us were great. I can only imagine how hard it must have been to compete against their own bot in the quarter finals. These same students have even graciously accepted our request that they join us at worlds to continue on as our drive team, even knowing that they will be competing against their own team yet again.

Thanks again! Without them we would have not gotten our spot at Worlds.

[bam-bam]

Originally Posted by ttldomination

I'm a little rusty on the rules about the wildcard spots, but 2415 already has a championship spot with their Engineering Inspiration award at P'tree. Does this mean that their next team receives that invite?

- Sunny G.

You are correct. 79, 379, and 2415 had attained wildcards previous to DC. That means all of the robots competing in the finals are going to the championships.

[Anupam Goli]

I'll allow Sean and whoever else from 2415 to elaborate on this, but 2415 also had cRIO issues at peachtree, which caused them to sit idle in a few matches. This time around, the issue was that it mysteriously dumped all of the code and wouldn't let them reload any of it. I think they've been through 2 cRIO's already, I'm wondering if it may be some sort of short in the way they are wiring the cRIO itself or the modules.

[santosh]

2415 also won E.I. at Peachtree so they were good on champs as well. I guess those spots (116 and 2415) go somewhere else now.

[ToddF]

We didn't compete at this regional, but I came up to watch Saturday as a spectator for my first time since becoming a mentor. The experience was thoroughly enjoyable. I spent the morning mostly looking at robots in the pits, and picking up as many best practices as possible. Then, in the afternoon, the elimination matches were great!

Before going to bed, I wanted to get some video of the finals up on youtube. Enjoy it here.

[Lil' Lavery]

Since there's already been a lot of talk of 2415's issues, I'll chime in what little I can. When preparing for F-2, their dashboard began indicating no code while tethered. This persisted after both redeploying code, and re-imaging the cRio.
At this point, the 5th seeded alliances' time-out had run out, and it was time to take the field for the 2nd finals match. The 2nd seed alliance opted to run 2v3, in the hope that 2415 could fix the issue before the 3rd match. 2415 spent the match and subsequent timeout replacing their cRio with a new unit, and then attempting to image and deploy code. Unfortunately this still didn't work, and the 2nd alliance was forced to call a back-up bot for the 3rd match.

2415 was an incredible competitor all weekend, and was a massive part of why the 2nd seeded alliance even reached the finals. They are a class act team with an awesome robot. It's unfortunate that the finals ended the way they did, but at least it's a memorable way to go out. Much of the elimination tournament is about survival, and an incredible alliance ended up coming out on top. 79, 379, and 383 deserve all the credit in the world.

[klmx30302]

Team 166 would like to thank teams 422, and 2642 for being the best alliance partners we could ask for! And we would like to congratulate teams 79, 379, and 383 on winning the regional. I think the quarterfinal matches we were up against you were the most exciting matches I have seen in a few years!

[Andrew Y.]

I'll chime in with what I know of what happened to our team so far.

The issue we had at Peachtree was not the Crio, but a line of code accidentally got deleted....

After F1 we tethered to do a systems check like always and completed one run of systems. During some discussion we decided to run one more to check a motor and thats when no code could be found in the "user command code area" (sorry im not a programmer or computer guy in any way.) We then redeployed code, formatted the crio, and re-imaged the Crio with no success.
After that we quickly got a new Crio thinking the old one had some type of failure and tried again. This had the same symptoms and 116 had to make the call to bring in a backup-robot.

We still have no idea what is going on with our robot, but after long discussions with the FTA after everything, we believe that our drive station may be corrupted and that caused both Crio's to be corrupted. We also believe the corruption may be in the Java virtual machine. We hav already started to port our code to C (based on this theory and other factors, this just gave us the push) to take a factor out. We figure less things running the better. We will shoot a update as soon as we figure out what happened.


Now, I want to say thank you to 116 and 4466 for their awesome play through the eliminations. It was a great run! 4466 may be a roockie, but they have one of the cleanest robots I have ever seen in FIRST. 116 made a huge choice to play F2 2V3 to give us more time to work our issues. Theses guys are a great team and it was a pleasure working with you guys. Thanks so much for selecting us to play with you. Also to the other alliances, these guys came over and offered help to get us back on the field. Class act!

The FTA, refs, robot inspectors, and volunteers were all a pleasure to work throughout the whole event, but even more so durring the troubles of the finals. They never said "you have 30 seconds and we are starting, we dont care what the problem is" like I have got at other regionals....but really worked with us trying to help and get us back on the field.

Thanks again to everyone and cant wait for championships