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

[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.