Robot Rodeo - fixing control problems

[miketwalker]

I think Innovation FIRST has done great with helping FIRST... but one issue I've always seen is that they have a tendancy to love to make their products work with only their products. Anybody who worked with a scoring computer this year knows what I'm talking about.

One of the major issues that Andrew Rudolph and I agreed on was that the electronics box and the scoring system were from 2 seperate fields. This caused major issues when working together. At the best-functioning point we had LEDs and E-stop buttons working on one side of the field, but nothing on the other and never any ball drops or sensors (they didn't even get power) for the 10 point balls.

Here are a list of recommendations from what I've seen that could be done to improve things:

Hardware:
* Simpler is better, having a backup system is a good step in the right direction, but by having so much stuff in the scoring computer (routers, custom-made electronics boxes, etc.), when one thing goes it all goes. For example, the router had issues this weekend but FIRST can only log in if the internet connection goes through the router built-in for some strange reason.
* Create a simple override for the "brain" boxes on each side so that if the scoring computer DOES go down at an offseason event or something, you can still have timers work in-sync from one side of the field to the other... with 4 plugs, 1 for each driver station that will do the normal override to give each team it's own radio channel... and have the timer automatically run autonomous and swap to driver control after the 15 seconds. This could easily be built by teams I'm sure, and like Gary said... coming up with something like that would be a great idea.
* Ball release solenoids, just a plain bad idea... they always had issues

Software:
* I think more time is needed for the programmer of the TacOps program to be able to debug. By the end of the season the software was running beautifully, but I know those first few weeks Rick Petty (I think that's his name) was going crazy trying to fix 5 or 6 competitions on his own working 24/7.
* Give more trust to the competition people themselves. For anything to be fixed, we had to provide an internet connection to allow FIRST to connect to run diagnostics, update team lists, add competitions, etc. At the UCF regional we had to run a really long phone line and sit there a few hours to update the software, and at Robot Rodeo we ended up running a 120ft cable trying to get an internet connection. It would be much much much better if there was a way to run diagnostics at the actual competition, as well as to be able to add team numbers and such... because it's just a plain pain in the butt to connect to the internet with those things all the time... and if you can view the problems there you can fix them saving so much hassle.
* I think Linux is a great OS, but I would much rather see a windows-based scoring program again. The reason for this is at Robot Rodeo we had issues with Linux on the primary computer so we couldn't even get to run TacOps. I think most people that work with the scoring computers in the league have much more background in Windows than Linux (I know I certainly do) and can fix errors with Windows much better than Linux. Linux can be very fidgity at some points and if it dies, it's hard to fix... especially at the competition site when you have no administration rights and need to get into Linux in the first place to establish an internet connection with FIRST.

Both:
* Definitly need to work on compatibility when having field equipment inter-mixed. When FIRST ships a scoring computer from one field, and an electronics box from another, they should be able to work together smoothly. I think this also focuses again on simplicity and keeping everything consistent from box to box.