2008 Bayou Regional

[Ed Sparks]

Originally Posted by Dad1279

Or the autonomous on 1 side only?
Does anyone have video or the score from this match?

This match will haunt me forever ...........

The field ran so well all weekend. I was helping IFI out at the Bayou regional because with 11 events going on, there were not enough IFI employees to go around. I had been baptized by fire at the now famous Peachtree regional and was praying all weekend that I would not have to go through anything like that again.

Then it happened .........

The #3 alliance never left the gate. I knew all 3 robots had an effective hybrid mode and was surprised it wasn't used (so I thought). After the match was finished, I was immediately confronted by team members and field personnel as to why the hybrid mode didn't run right. The equipment I was monitoring does not log the history of the autonomous or disable flags but it does keep stats about packet loss and drops. The data scanner confirmed that the radio link was good at that time. I also reported that none of the robots on Red left the wall. At that point I backed out of the conversation because, unfortunately, my team was involved and I felt it would be improper to say anything else. The alliance captain appealed to the head ref and she decided to re-play the match.

Each side of the field is controlled independently so it is possible that something like this could happen on one side only. The "Red" controller and "Blue" controller are connected to the common "Field" controller via Ethernet. The "Field" controller at the scoring table sends out commands to the zone controllers on each end. They process these signals and pass them to the IFI Arena controllers (3 on each end) which sends these signals via wireless radio links to & from your 'bot. There's a lot of stuff in those zone controllers that can go wrong but I can't tell you exactly what happened. IFI is only responsible for the radio links. We'll never know.

A similar thing happened at Peachtree except the Field controller lost its connection to the "Red" zone controller and nothing on Red would work. We wound up running the whole elimination tournament with six dongles.

You probably noticed that I decided to monitor the OI's the rest of the tournament to be sure every match had a full 15 second hybrid mode (thanks to the volunteers that helped me). That's why you saw six of us jump out of the end zones at the end of hybrid mode. We never saw this happen again.

It was weird ...... and I truly wished it never happened.