Time to include communications at each driver station?

[Abhishek R]

Originally Posted by dellagd

I've thought about implementing things like this on my own team, and the possibility of having it between alliance partners in the past, and honestly I've always thought that it wouldn't help at all.

First of all, I've personally never had my drivers tell me that they can't hear me well nor have I seen the effects of this. These are loud events, so you talk loudly to your drivers. I don't know, there just isn't a problem with it. I mean you are right behind them the majority of the time (accounting for jumping over to say something to another team's coach).

That being said, if there were a communication device, I'd also have to be able to count on it 100%. As a coach, if I want to tell my partners something, I need to be absolutely sure that they are aware of what I told them. For this, generally I look for some sort of visual signal that they understood (like a thumbs up or a waive), I mean they're occupied with coaching their own team too. If I had a headset, I personally wouldn't feel really comfortable trusting it, and to be sure I'd probably want a 'roger' (or a QSL for those hams out there) confirmation. But I mean, people are going to forget to respond, and I really don't want to be in the position to nag another coach during a match.

Bottom line, communicating in person just feels like a more foolproof option. I already have 6 robots on the field I have to worry about, I don't want a radio (that I didn't even set up) to be on top of that.

That's my take on it. People can talk loudly, and your all only a few feet from each other. It's not broken, I don't need it fixed.

Of course, it's not a question of an issue. There's nothing per se wrong with the regular talking behind the glass between the coaches. But it is a question of whether or not we can make it better. Right now, there is a bit of hierarchy (at least in my experience) where the drive coaches are communicating the strategy between each other and then relaying it down to the drivers at the controls. What if you could make it more seamless by having direct communication between the coaches and drive teams on a single channel without ever having to look up from the controls or robot, for both the coach and drivers?

In the end, I don't see why it couldn't be optional for teams to use if the alliance isn't comfortable with it. Having used headsets to communicate in competitive games myself, I can see the potential in an FRC application - communication is the most important thing to implementing effective strategy, and as we know, effective strategy wins matches.

[alicen]

Half of this thread is kind of a scary thought to me. Last year I was a ref at my home regional and we had headsets with mics for all the refs to communicate during the matches and otherwise.

There would be a large number of issues if the refs had to inform teams what they were about to get penalties on real time while trying to watch the game and confirm or deny various things. Many times on our field, the conversations over the mic would be, "Was that [penalty X]? I don't have a good angle from here" and then the response. Or it would be someone calling a penalty on a team and another ref claiming it wasn't a penalty, they had a better vantage point. Most of our ref team has worked together for a number of years, but if Coaches/Drivers/Etc were to be able to listen while we worked stuff out, we'd have a thousand more people standing in our question box after every match.

To make all that worse would be the possibility of the Coaches/Drivers/Etc trying to talk to us during the match. Everybody knows that FIRST events are controlled chaos in many ways, and that's just an added level that I can't see making anything better for anybody.

That being said, I can see the upsides to the alliances having communication among themselves. When I was on a team and competed, we just tried to talk strategy before the match and understand how everyone wanted to play, and do our best to play the respective parts.

Just my two cents though--

[MrTechCenter]

Originally Posted by alicen

Half of this thread is kind of a scary thought to me. Last year I was a ref at my home regional and we had headsets with mics for all the refs to communicate during the matches and otherwise.

There would be a large number of issues if the refs had to inform teams what they were about to get penalties on real time while trying to watch the game and confirm or deny various things. Many times on our field, the conversations over the mic would be, "Was that [penalty X]? I don't have a good angle from here" and then the response. Or it would be someone calling a penalty on a team and another ref claiming it wasn't a penalty, they had a better vantage point. Most of our ref team has worked together for a number of years, but if Coaches/Drivers/Etc were to be able to listen while we worked stuff out, we'd have a thousand more people standing in our question box after every match.

To make all that worse would be the possibility of the Coaches/Drivers/Etc trying to talk to us during the match. Everybody knows that FIRST events are controlled chaos in many ways, and that's just an added level that I can't see making anything better for anybody.

That being said, I can see the upsides to the alliances having communication among themselves. When I was on a team and competed, we just tried to talk strategy before the match and understand how everyone wanted to play, and do our best to play the respective parts.

Just my two cents though--

Maybe having refs warning drive teams in real-time or communicating with the drive teams might be difficult, but what if they had a small monitor at each end of the field (kind of like the assist monitor that nobody used) that flashed when a foul was committed and showed what foul it was and which team it was assessed to. This would be a pretty easy feature to add in and could lead to less use of the question box.

[AdamHeard]

Only if we get to bring our own headsets.... No way I'd want to share the same grimy, germy, teenagery headsets that everyone else uses at the event.

Love the idea. Only trifle I have is that it's no fun to be the guy who has 4 different voices coming in at once and having to decipher who said what and what each means.

[Laaba 80]

Personally I don't think this would be beneficial. Coaches spend the majority of their time telling their drivers what to do. Since I don't care that team 9999 is telling their driver to turn left, it will quickly turn into background noise, similar to the game announcer.

[alicen]

Originally Posted by MrTechCenter

Maybe having refs warning drive teams in real-time or communicating with the drive teams might be difficult, but what if they had a small monitor at each end of the field (kind of like the assist monitor that nobody used) that flashed when a foul was committed and showed what foul it was and which team it was assessed to. This would be a pretty easy feature to add in and could lead to less use of the question box.

I don't know about all other regionals, but for ours we always announce who got what penalties after each match so that hopefully they will realize the mistake and adapt their gameplay.
Also, as I mentioned before, sometimes the problem with real time penalizing is viewpoints. It is a penalty from one viewpoint, but isn't from another, so the refs must discuss sometimes before finalizing. That's a lot to ask of some people in a very small time frame

[jman4747]

I like the idea of the three coaches talking. Just put one green and one pink 3.5mm audio jack and a 5v USB at each station, simple. Maybe have it so a whole drive team can hear each other but only coaches can talk between teams? Also this doesn't need to be national it could be done by an individual regional right? (Peachtree please).

[RomeroFRC5012]

Originally Posted by EricH

That's kind of an interesting idea. If I was to make a suggestion...

Have it coaches-only, at least at first--the 3 coaches on the alliance all get a headset and talk to each other, with the option of keeping drivers' instruction "off-mike". But also give the refs (head ref or appropriate substitute) a mike-only interface, so that they can call a foul in straight to the coaches as the foul is dished out. Something like "Hey, Red, back off or get a pinning foul in 3... 2... 1... Tech foul!"

I am a driver so i know the struggles of giving or receiving information from the couches so this will not only help for that but it will help because at the end of every match we will know what fouls or whatnot were put upon us so there's no guessing who won

[Canon reeves]

I would prefer a headset with my team only. It would be better for the coach to be able to communicate with the human player than with the other coaches. Since the coaches are all there beside each other, they can communicate easier already than the human player, at least in Arial Assist. As a driver, I understand how common it is for the driver just to block out background noise, and a headset with the only voice I need to listen to at the moment would be nice.

[GeeTwo]

First, a disclosure: I've never been "behind the glass." Our head coach did this for the first few matches our rookie year, and since then it's been all students.

If anything is done here, it should certainly be well-regulated and the channels standardized; a wild-west situation would introduce more problems (and OBTW even greater asymmetry to well-funded teams) than it would solve.
Having a coach be able to speak to his drivers over a dedicated channel would probably be good but apparently unnecessary in most cases. A more reasonable use of this capability would be to have the alliance lead (team #1 for ranking rounds, lead team for playoffs) be an "alliance captain" who would have a dedicated channel to his team captains and human players. This could either mean that the lead team gets an extra human, or that there are only two regular HP, and the lead team's HP would become the team coach in this case.
Spotters off-field sounds particularly problematic, and should be limited to a VERY small number per team (zero or one), and those should only be speaking to a coach, not a driver or HP, and certainly not the drivers or HP of other teams.

[dellagd]

Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence

Love the idea. Only trifle I have is that it's no fun to be the guy who has 4 different voices coming in at once and having to decipher who said what and what each means.

Thats one more I forgot to mention, which I totally can see happening. That being said, if I could have a speaker at my driverstation that plays from the ref's mic for calling penalties, now THAT would be awesome.

Also, agreed on the BYO-Headset thing.

[Munchskull]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Only if we get to bring our own headsets.... No way I'd want to share the same grimy, germy, teenagery headsets that everyone else uses at the event.

Agreed. I would want to use my Razer Kraken over anything they could/would have. Plus it is not much to ask for teams to bring there own. Most ten dollop sets of earbuds come with a built in mic.

*Edit* What if the com was Coach to drive with a button the coach could press to talk to other coaches?

[alicen]

Originally Posted by jman4747

I like the idea of the three coaches talking. Just put one green and one pink 3.5mm audio jack and a 5v USB at each station, simple. Maybe have it so a whole drive team can hear each other but only coaches can talk between teams? Also this doesn't need to be national it could be done by an individual regional right? (Peachtree please).

Most of the Peachtree people this year have their hands a bit full with preparing for the new Georgia Regional as well (Georgia Southern Classic Regional).

Also, having been someone who has helped to set up the field (and all the electronics) for a regional, adding more wires and plug ins is not as simple as it sounds! Just think about the couple of things that one team plugs in and has to connect with at the start of each match. Multiply that by six and add whatever light up field elements there are, it can get pretty crazy pretty fast. Some years when setting up the field, we start at noon and don't leave till 10pm or later

[JesseK]

This ... but only if it has Push-To-Talk (PTT). Anyone who's done online gaming or trained for live tactical situations understands why. Yet then, what would the drivers do to activate PTT? What would the coach do? If it's so cumbersome, would everyone even be willing to use it?

Would lack of bringing a team's own headset be an unwritten preclusion to being on an alliance in elims, like Mecanum drive trains are for some teams?