[FTC]: FVC (Vex) VS. FTC (Tetrix)

[jbbjjbt]

Originally Posted by gblake

So many (none of them productive) thoughts come to mind

Oh by the way - I wonder if Jon Thompson - the original poster in this thread - got any useful information from this discussion?

Blake
Tastes Great!
Less Filing!

I did get some useful information, especially about worlds. I also got some good entertainment. I've wanted to see the VEX channel with weights for a long time.

I think this is a good discussion that needs to take place. I hope it continues throughout the year.

I am personally on the fence. I love all the people in FTC but certain things drive me crazy. I spent way way too many hours trying to hook up Bluetooth. As a team we spent way too may hours building a robot and developing code just to be beaten by the Field Management System. Somehow busting gears and twisting axles was just more fun.

[lynca]

Originally Posted by jbbjjbt

I did get some useful information, especially about worlds. I also got some good entertainment. I've wanted to see the VEX channel with weights for a long time.

I think this is a good discussion that needs to take place. I hope it continues throughout the year.

I am personally on the fence. I love all the people in FTC but certain things drive me crazy. I spent way way too many hours trying to hook up Bluetooth. As a team we spent way too may hours building a robot and developing code just to be beaten by the Field Management System. Somehow busting gears and twisting axles was just more fun.

I am also getting useful information and interesting discussion about both programs. Regardless of politics, Pitsco and IFI will continue to compete and improve their VEX & TETRIX product line. This is much better than LEGO which has no competitors (FLL should be screaming for more corporate competition) !

I'll throw in my experiences with VEX. The people in VEX are amazing and the competition experience has undergone growing pains. The VEX Robotevents site has been somewhat difficult to register a team. However, in the last few months they have improved drastically ! The VEX clutches do eventually round out and plastic gears sometimes lose teeth (high strength gears should fix this problem).

[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by lynca

This is much better than LEGO which has no competitors.

http://rollingrobots.com/robotics-camp

[ttldomination]

Hahaha.

Well its obvious that no side is backing down...and luckily for us, our economic system is capitalist, which means that people will undoubtedly go for what they like the most, and we can argue and argue as to what is better, but it is ultimately people's experiences with the event that'll matter the most so...

I think I've seen this argument in this thread each year in the past, and in a similar manner, people eventually get a little on edge, and we loose focus of what's what. I personally will focus in what I've chosen, and will move on from this silly debate.

[BLAQmx]

Originally Posted by jbbjjbt

... certain things drive me crazy. I spent way way too many hours trying to hook up Bluetooth. As a team we spent way too may hours building a robot and developing code just to be beaten by the Field Management System.

Fixing these pain points has been one of the primary goals for the developers working on the FTC software and FMS for the 2010 season.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by BLAQmx

Fixing these pain points has been one of the primary goals for the developers working on the FTC software and FMS for the 2010 season.

So we can expect this season's FTC competitions to be smooth and relatively free of delays? The 2 hour delay at the beginning of the Chicago event, the 10+ minute match cycle, and the insistence by the FIRST staff (Ken & James) at the event that the field & controls problems were the teams' fault turned me off of FTC forever. FIRST replaced a solid product with a half-baked solution before it was ready and the teams suffered because of that decision.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

So we can expect this season's FTC competitions to be smooth and relatively free of delays? The 2 hour delay at the beginning of the Chicago event, the 10+ minute match cycle, and the insistence by the FIRST staff (Ken & James) at the event that the field & controls problems were the teams' fault turned me off of FTC forever. FIRST replaced a solid product with a half-baked solution before it was ready and the teams suffered because of that decision.

To be completely fair, I experienced similar headaches with FTC (Vex) in 2008 in Atlanta. Repeated interference happened for Thursday matches (at one point, the drive team turned off the controllers and held them autonomous style, and the robot continued to drive), that was repeatedly blamed on our antenna placement, later discovered to be a field fault.

The point of the above isn't to complain about the past or anything, but "issues with the control system" is a fairly common robotics problem. It's not pleasant (and at the time, I was very, very upset, as I'd just spent a month raising the money to compete at the event), but it's sadly not unusual, in my experience. Whether or not this is something one SHOULD expect from events... probably not...

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

To be completely fair, I experienced similar headaches with FTC (Vex) in 2008 in Atlanta. Repeated interference happened for Thursday matches (at one point, the drive team turned off the controllers and held them autonomous style, and the robot continued to drive), that was repeatedly blamed on our antenna placement, later discovered to be a field fault.

Veering off-topic a bit here, but... the symptom of your robot driving on its own when it's supposed to be in driver mode cannot be a field fault. It's physically impossible with the VEX equipment. The cause in nearly every case of this was that the VEX microcontroller reset because either too much current was being drawn from the motors (improper gearing, etc) or a software bug in the team's code.

In a nutshell, if someone told you it was a "field fault" when your robot drove on its own, they were wrong. I saw a lot of FTC(Vex) teams that would insist that "something was wrong with the field" only to find a bug in their code after someone helped them look through it.

I've been to a lot of VEX events (FTC(Vex) and VRC), and I've never seen anything remotely as bad as what happened in FTC Chicago last year. And, I've heard many reports that the Chicago experience was common at other events too. That's the basis of Mike's point.

[Chris is me]

I don't remember the specifics, but I believe it was something to do with the field's enabling and disabling of tethered controllers, and radio interference from the other Vex field. The motor use was fairly standard and the code issues did not happen at the previous event. Anyhow, this is a bit of a digression.

I do know from what I've heard at FTC events from friends and peers still participating in it, the field problems were worse than anything I'd seen.

[BLAQmx]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

So we can expect this season's FTC competitions to be smooth and relatively free of delays?

That is certainly the goal. Part of this is purely technical; addressing connectivity issues and making the system more robust (an example of this is improved LabVIEW templates that remove all of the Bluetooth lag). Part of this is ease of use. Hopefully these two things (among others) will make competitions move more smoothly. The one thing we cannot account for is user error. Because all computer based systems are inherently complicated it is not a trivial task to train the volunteers who run competitions and matches. This being said our volunteers are not the problem (I <3 FIRST volunteers and staff), but rather the solution will be the developers ability to make the system simple, elegant, and most importantly: well documented.

On a note of documentation I am going to stress (again) how essential it is to read the FTC Getting Started Manual. We have made a considerable investment in documentation this year (Help files and the Getting Started Manual). While the Getting Started Manual is mostly geared towards LabVIEW development it contains a lot of good information that any team can put to use.

[JesseK]

I'm pretty sure that since FIRST is broken down into regional organizations, each region was responsible for its own FMS and setup. Our regional director was in communications with teams asking for feedback on comms issues and even setup a scrimmage with the actual FMS software a couple weeks before the VA competition. At the DE, MD, and VA competitions our teams attended, there were temporary hiccups. Yet those were simple matters of restarting the FMS laptop and/or swapping field within the division. Having 2 fields for each division made everything very smooth, yet I suspect that such a setup is a regional and not a national decision. At all 3 competitions, we were out of there by 7pm, which isn't bad considering that the previous year (FTC/VEX) it was 9pm.

A 2 hour delay due to FMS comms tells me that someone needs to light a fire and get someone motivated to test things ahead of time. Along the same lines, I wouldn't expect FIRST to ignore the complaints teams had from last year, and I would expect improvements all around.