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Originally Posted by pitzoid
Is it right that teams were bypassed to get a match going on time? Don’t know, wasn’t there. But for the most part, if a Match was scheduled to start and all the teams weren’t, kinda sounds like the real world….. I mean, planes usually don’t wait for you when you’re late to the gate, why should FMS?
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So how does that work in the other direction? We lost almost an hour at BMR due to the failure of FMS and the field. Why should 5,000 people have to wait for that to get fixed?
We've got people in this thread calling teams who forget to plug in their radios "boneheaded" and generally deriding them for forgetting something that's easy to forget after rushing to get the Labview change that just took 10 minutes to compile loaded on their robot with seconds to spare and something that they didn't have to worry about with the IFI system because the IFI engineers anticipated this problem and designed a solution in (separate tether port). Yet any time similar criticism is spoken towards the FIRST side of things, there's pleas for patience as the event staff "learn the ropes" of the new system, or accusations that it's un-GP to complain about FIRST's stuff not working, etc. It all seems a little lopsided to me.
Basically, FIRST took a working system, made it more error-prone, and then blames the teams for making errors. Nice.
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The people who equate the money spent on this program to the number of matches a team runs are missing the big picture. Yea, it stinks when your bot just sits on the field while the other bots run around, but you learn a lot from that.
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I don't really think teaching teams hard lessons is FIRST's big picture. Their "big picture" is inspiring students and getting them interested in science and technology. Sitting on the side of the field with a non-functioning robot is not inspiring and makes the technology look error-prone and frustrating. I believe IFI understood this well and that's why they had someone at every event making sure that every robot was linked up and ready to go for each match. The fact that they switched to a new system takes forever to link up is a decision FIRST made that they should have to live with, but they seem to be shifting the burden of this decision to the teams who had no input when the decision was made.
As you can all tell, I'm getting very tired of everyone ripping on the teams. Maybe I should take the same attitude as others here are taking next time a team asks me for help in the pits. If they were too "boneheaded" to show up with a working robot then too bad for them. Wonder how FIRST would feel about that attitude.