ARENA Fault

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

If it was really an issue of losing communication, the FMS logs would confirm that to be the case.

I keep seeing this idea presented in all these threads about suspected field faults. I disagree with it, and I'm surprised more people don't feel the same way.

1. Most of us have no idea what the FMS even logs in the first place, and therefore what kind of failures could be detected with these logs. For all I know, the log may consist of a timer that fires every 100ms that just writes "Everything is fine" into the logfile. I'm sure that the logs contain lots of data, and maybe it's enough that it really can rule out anything but a team problem, but how do we know there isn't a bug in the logging mechanism? Or some other gremlin? Surely anyone who's been involved with software for more than a few weeks can admit that bugs can end up anywhere and can easily trick you into thinking something is working when it isn't.

2. Somewhat of a rehashing of #1, can the field system confirm that packets from the OI are getting to the robot? Or does it just verify that it can "see" the robot and OI from it's vantage point? Is it possible that FMS can be successfully connected to the team's OI and successfully pinging (or whatever) the robot, but that the OI and the robot aren't talking to each other?

3. Dozens of teams are reporting problems here. Ultimately, it may not be a problem with the field hardware, but it seems pretty clear that there are defects with the system as a whole (the system being everything from the Classmate and Rio to the arena controls, the WiFI adapters, joysticks, etc). Who's responsible for the overall operation of the entire controls package? Who's looking into these reports of issues? Surely all the technical folks at FIRST aren't just writing this off as a team issue, are they? Even if they believe it is the fault of the teams, I would hope that they would want to get to the bottom of it anyway, just to be sure. With so many different vendors involved in the system, though, I'm not sure who takes ultimate ownership of a potential system-level issue.

I've been involved in enough FIRST competitions to know that when the people working at the event say, "there were no errors with the field", what they usually really mean is, "We couldn't find any specific problem, and therefore we're going to blame you (the team) so we don't have to replay the match. If we admit that we aren't 100% sure what happened, we'll be here for weeks as we replay almost every single match." I've worked at plenty of events and I've been part of these conversations several times.