SBPLI Regional Discussion

[jreneew2]

Congratulations to all the teams that won awards today! Just wanted to open this thread for discussion about the regional. Hope you had am awesome time.

Team 2053

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by jreneew2

Congratulations to all the teams that won awards today! Just wanted to open this thread for discussion about the regional. Hope you had am awesome time.

Team 2053

Congratulations to our partners from the Iowa regional, 1156, for their regional victory. You guys were a pleasure to work with at Iowa, and I hope we get the chance to see you again at championships.

[jreneew2]

My thoughts on the regional:

- this was our first time here and we honestly didn't like it as much as Pittsburgh. Probably because of our lackluster performance. We had a lot of issues that were not preventable in any way. At the end of the first day, we looked pretty good and if we pulled of three wins, we would be in a nice position to be picked. However, our second day, one match we had the driver station computer crash on us. We had to reboot and obviously we were dead in the water the whole game. After that, our last match, a certain team decided to ram us in the neutral zone with something outside their frame perimeter. They got stuck to us and they hit our power button causing us to be dead again for the whole match. They got a yellow card for it, but the damage was already done. We knew teams would see that we didn't move for the last two matches and we were of their pick list. This also caused us to fall in ranking points.

Also, as this is my last year on the drive team and the team, so being disabled for my whole last match, EVER was heartbreaking.

I also would like to note the issue with the field. The lights changed from Thursday to Friday, so all of our vision values were off. We had lots of trouble finding values, especially with no calibration time.

Overall, Tigertronics had a good time at the event, it could have been better for us.

Again, congratulations to all the teams that won and hope you have a great time at worlds.

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by jreneew2

I also would like to note the issue with the field. The lights changed from Thursday to Friday, so all of our vision values were off. We had lots of trouble finding values, especially with no calibration time.

Did you ask anyone if you could calibrate it this morning? I am sure if you asked they would have let you.

All in all, I was very surprised with how things turned out for you guys specifically. Personally if I was an alliance captain you would have been on my list.

[dougwilliams]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

Did you ask anyone if you could calibrate it this morning? I am sure if you asked they would have let you.

All in all, I was very surprised with how things turned out for you guys specifically. Personally if I was an alliance captain you would have been on my list.

We asked a few times at the beginning and end of the days and were informed that such a request would not be possible. Although they agreed they significantly changed the lighting a few times.

[Sperkowsky]

Now my thoughts

Just so everyone knows I did not compete in this event but, was there all 3 days the entire time live streaming it.

To start I was very impressed with the turnaround times compared to NYC despite there only being 15 minutes for lunch on Friday. Elims especially went very quick. Waterloo started at the same time but, SBPLI was giving away awards before 2056 lost their streak.

I was also very impressed with how they treated me as the streamer. I was given as 1080i 60FPS feed of the field along with 100MBS internet. In the end I was able to stream it in native resolution at 60FPS without any studders (Except for the stream crashing during QF-1 although that was my fault as I tried installing an OBS video plugin and was going to play all the reveal videos the teams pre-match which ended up breaking OBS).

Overall I think it was a well run event. Still probably not enough to make it our home regional next year but, Ill gladly run the livestream again.

[jreneew2]

Will the streams be archived anwhere? I checked ustream and clicked on videos, but it didn't seem to do anything. Ill checm on my desktop when I get home.

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by jreneew2

Will the streams be archived anwhere? I checked ustream and clicked on videos, but it didn't seem to do anything. Ill checm on my desktop when I get home.

I hate to say this but...

Qualifications will not be archived.

I planned on it but did not realize that the free version of ustream does not allow archiving. I had to use ustream due to some restrictions given to me through SBPLI and would have used YouTube personally. I had a paid ustream account given to me by a friend but was logged into the wrong one and could not change it on TBA.

I tried saving them all locally once I realized this morning that but ran out of space and had to delete all of it so I had space for elims.

Eliminations are all locally saved and will be uploaded tomorrow. But, I know that doesn't help you.

Sorry.

[jreneew2]

Alright, we recorded some of our matches on a go pro on the bot. Hopefully a team has some footage as well.

Thank you for the awesome and high quality stream

[Mister_E]

Originally Posted by jreneew2

My thoughts on the regional:

I also would like to note the issue with the field. The lights changed from Thursday to Friday, so all of our vision values were off. We had lots of trouble finding values, especially with no calibration time.
.

It appears we had issues tracking on Day 2. We thought it may have been the carpet bunching, tipping the robot up in front of defense positions 3 and 4. In positions 2 and 5, we found the lighting on Saturday caused our tracking to take a tad longer, then switch between goals ever so slightly. We had absolutely no issues on Friday.

Sans target tracking hiccups on Saturday, and well, of course, tipping over in QF2, I couldn't be prouder of that robot's performance.

Congrats to all!!!

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

I had a paid ustream account given to me by a friend but was logged into the wrong one and could not change it on TBA.

In the future, you can pm me/Eugene or email contact@tba and we can change webcasts on TBA for you. You can also suggest the other stream link, then both will appear.

Sorry to hear about the mix-up

[Vale]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

To start I was very impressed with the turnaround times compared to NYC despite there only being 15 minutes for lunch on Friday. Elims especially went very quick. Waterloo started at the same time but, SBPLI was giving away awards before 2056 lost their streak.

Yeah, definitely. If I remember correctly, on Saturday, by the time of the last quals, even with a field fault happening, we were still ahead of schedule by a few minutes.

I really enjoyed the atmosphere of SBPLI. Everyone involved made the event very fun. For some odd reason, some of our scouts and I noticed that we were feeling much less exhausted than during our first regional, despite similar sleeping schedules. Actually, we may have ended up with even less sleep on a couple of those days. I personally learned a lot to develop scouting even more in the future, as well. I've gotta give props to the musical performances that happened during the event, too. They all performed swimmingly!

Thank you to all of the volunteers and organizers who made this event what it was, and congratulations to all of the teams! This game was a very interesting one to design and build for, and I was very proud of all of the work teams put into their bots! To those of y'all going to champs, I wish y'all luck! I hope you find a great and similar success.

[Mark McLeod]

Here's a video clip of Don Qixote singing "The Impossible Dream"
https://youtu.be/KBzVAOxUs_8

[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Here's a video clip of Don Qixote singing "The Impossible Dream"
https://youtu.be/KBzVAOxUs_8

Just curious where did you find this clip? It looks like it's from the stream but, I don't have a backup of it and neither does ustream. Was SBPLI saving all of it?

[robotics2]

At the long Island SBPLI regional there were poor robot playing conditions, the field had bundles of wires running beneath it and the one side had large wrinkles. After alliance selection, teams who were not selected were not allowed to go out the garage door up the ramp, which is the only way to bring out large items such as tool carts. We spoke to the venue instructor and she said it is a FIRST rule that you may not leave until after closing ceremony. I do not believe this is to be true but I could be wrong. There were the storage boxes for the field near the door which people could have maneuvered around easily. They had asked us if we could get our stuff out through there, but then said it was a liability that something may get damaged, they then said we could take all the stuff up the elevator to the loading dock. This dock was about 4 feet elevated with only stairs no ramp so the only way teams could get their stuff out before closing ceremony was to pick them up and put them down over the ledge or carry them down the stairs. This became a problem with these large heavy boxes of parts and tools. To get these down people had to empty everything out and put it all back. This is unacceptable. One of the teams had a 600lbs cart that they had to empty but even after that still weighed about 200lbs so they had to tip it near the edge and tip it over and let it down. This should be the liability they could have gotten seriously hurt.