2015 Between-Match Delays

[Qbot2640]

I may wrong, but it seems to me that the delays between matches can be particularly long this year. Before the season started, I anticipated field reset to be particularly difficult with the large number of game pieces and the mess they can create, but most events I've seen have handled this extremely well. However, there still seem to be some extremely long delays while everyone is just waiting for the match to start. Is my perception correct?

And if so...is there a reason for this?

I'm starting to give some thought to the schedule for our fall off-season, and just want to make sure I take everything I can possibly predict into account.

[BrendanB]

Transportation configuration is a big part of the delays. Some teams need to dis-assemble parts of their robot before they can remove their robot from the field and some robots in the next batch of teams need to get their robot ready for the start of the match.

Add in the usual field delays of getting robots connected and it gets hard to stick to the match schedule for time.

[Jared]

I've experienced three or four delays on the field from our team so far, all of which were caused by issues with mDNS.

The laptop will say "FMS Connected, correct station", and our robot will show up as connected with the battery voltage and everything, but the field people cannot see that our laptop is connected. We must disable/enable the network adapter, restart the driver station software, and sometimes even restart the robot.

I've also noticed similar things happening to our alliance partners, where their laptops don't connect to the field, and they have to restart things or try connecting and disconnecting again and again to connect to the field.

The field seems to always connect to the robots in the end, but this year, it seems to take longer on average for all teams to get full communications.

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Jared

I've experienced three or four delays on the field from our team so far, all of which were caused by issues with mDNS.

The laptop will say "FMS Connected, correct station", and our robot will show up as connected with the battery voltage and everything, but the field people cannot see that our laptop is connected. We must disable/enable the network adapter, restart the driver station software, and sometimes even restart the robot.

I've also noticed similar things happening to our alliance partners, where their laptops don't connect to the field, and they have to restart things or try connecting and disconnecting again and again to connect to the field.

The field seems to always connect to the robots in the end, but this year, it seems to take longer on average for all teams to get full communications.

Yes, at Bayou we had a number of matches delayed for FMS connect issues, two our team, three or four others. I did not know whether they were robot or driver station end.

[Conor Ryan]

Matches this year are generally 8 minutes in length (End to End, including the actual match). Most of the delays are due to the set up times required for the whole transportation configuration stuff. Field and connectivity issues are rare, but do occur.

Generally after everyone has been on the field once, schedule a 10 minute break, you'll use the time for sure and after that the schedule tends to stay true. Getting that first match out of the way is difficult, where to go, who does what and various other nonsense.

Other than that build 5 minutes for later in the morning issues and 5 minutes in the early afternoon and you'll be on schedule if you get lucky.

[ayeckley]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

Field and connectivity issues are rare, but do occur.

While this was generally true at Pittsburgh it was not the case at Buckeye. I'd estimate (based on my personal observation) that on Thursday less than 25% of Practice Matches required FTA/FTAA involvement including going out to the Alliance Stations. That rate shot up to over 80% for Qualification Matches on Friday, and back below 25% on Saturday.

Anyone know which field is at Windsor?. I'm tempted to say the field at Buckeye was #11 but there a >50% chance that I'm mistaken.

[Jared Russell]

mDNS can make establishing the connection to the robot take for-freaking-ever. If anything, the large number of game pieces and long robot setup times help to mask just how long the delay can be.

[MrTechCenter]

We ran into a similar issue at Central Valley in Week 2. We were behind schedule quite a bit, so we had teams unplug their driver stations immediately after the match ended and the next match would plug their stations in as quickly as possible. The driver stations for the next match would connect to the FMS, but the next match wouldn't be pre-started yet, so they wouldn't see communications with their robot yet. Most of the time, we had to have teams restart the driver station application. But even then, the delay wasn't huge.

I think the biggest delays come during eliminations, because alliances will face back-to-back situations and this requires a field timeout. Tack on a timeout or two and there's a slightly longer today. Still, most regionals are ending on time or earlier than expected.

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

mDNS can make establishing the connection to the robot take for-freaking-ever. If anything, the large number of game pieces and long robot setup times help to mask just how long the delay can be.

Once a good rhythm is established the various sources of delay tend to align, i.e. they all mask each other and it appears smooth and painless on the surface.
At a couple of my events we timed the inter-match delay and it was interesting to see how much perception and reality were uncorrelated.

[epylko]

Originally Posted by ayeckley

...
Anyone know which field is at Windsor?. I'm tempted to say the field at Buckeye was #11 but there a >50% chance that I'm mistaken.

I'm at Windsor. How do you tell what field is here?

[ayeckley]

Originally Posted by epylko

I'm at Windsor. How do you tell what field is here?

The road cases should have the number printed on them. I don't recall where they were stored last year; I think in the north-west corner of the gym near the mentor lounge.

[epylko]

Originally Posted by ayeckley

The road cases should have the number printed on them. I don't recall where they were stored last year; I think in the north-west corner of the gym near the mentor lounge.

I'll check tomorrow. One of the volunteers said that the US kits stay in the US and the Canada kits stay in Canada. Either way, I'll try and verify tomorrow.

[GeeTwo]

Usually at Bayou, by the time the score had been settled, the robots cleared and replaced, and the field reset (which usually went pretty briskly considering that there are over 200 game pieces), the match was able to start within another minute or so; Chris Copleand often started announcing matchups before the last team was off the field to help achieve this.
About one match in four or five seemed to have extra delays. Of the ones where I could see or later heard the reason, two were improper robot placement (hanging over the landfill or auto zone) and the rest (about five or six) were connectivity issues (one robot, the rest driver station). I suspect most of the others were connectivity, as well; I could occasionally see one team working hard behind the polycarbonate while the others waited.

[Greg McKaskle]

The "mDNS" issues are something that is still being investigated. The better name for it might be "slow DS-robot connection on field", because there are a few glitches here and there that show similar symptoms, but different reasons for the delay/breakage. Also, the necessary DS restarts are caused by a few error conditions that require the TCP comms between FMS and DS to restart. They weren't discovered during beta and show up more often on some laptops than on others.

Good news is that some fixes are being rolled out with field configuration. Others would require new DS or library releases, but there is considerable overhead with a mid-season release. So I guess the summary is that your perception is correct, and it is something that is being worked on more than it may appear.

Greg McKaskle

[EricH]

Originally Posted by epylko

I'll check tomorrow. One of the volunteers said that the US kits stay in the US and the Canada kits stay in Canada. Either way, I'll try and verify tomorrow.

Don't rely on the road case number: 11 is the ref case, 19 is spare FMS console, 07 is field supplies IIRC. The small tags might or might not have anything regarding which field.

You want the case COLOR. All the cases in one field match in color--and one or more of them are generally kept right next to the field. Example: Gold field is currently in SVR, after trekking to Inland Empire, CVR, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Ventura. (Though, I think Gold field is #6, at least it uses radio set #6.)