Team 254 Presents: Chezy Champs

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by magnets

Team 254's FMS is far superior to FIRST's FMS system, and the graphics for scores, overlays, and rankings are beautiful and smoothly animated. The color displays above the driver stations with team names are awesome. Pedestal lighting and hot goal lights are correct. Scores update instantly, field lights respond instantly, and the assist counters appear instantly, which never happened before. There are no delays with anything here.

On top of all that, it was developed in months, vs. the years that FIRST has had to work on theirs.

Thanks. It was a fun project to work on and it was gratifying to see it work as intended, with no foghorned matches all weekend.

For those wondering about the couple of delays on Saturday, Cheesy Arena was picking up on sporadic dropped packets between all of the team's driver stations and robots after all the robots were connected prior to the match. We delayed starting the matches to investigate and looked at the switch logs to figure out if there was any abnormal traffic, but didn't find anything. The packet loss went away as soon as we started the matches, and all six robots remained connected throughout. We finally figured out the root cause during the quarter-finals on Sunday -- the wireless handheld camera from the PNW A/V setup transmits at 5GHz, and was causing packet loss while it was on and in certain positions relative to the field/robots. Since we would switch to the full-field camera at the start of the match and shut the handheld off, the problem was never manifesting during the match itself and so was more difficult to troubleshoot.

We'll be releasing the source and binaries to Cheesy Arena within the next couple of weeks, once I remove the CC branding and write some documentation.

The lights are custom -- the Phillips lights and DMX controllers are prohibitively expensive so we made our own, driven by an embedded processor which was controlled over the field network via UDP.