ARENA Fault

[kylelanman]

Originally Posted by EricH

I know that at Arizona, we did have two experts (not necessarily professionals) who could find errors. One designed the FMS system and was judging the event; the other was a beta tester (2 years) who got a volunteer pass so that he wouldn't keep getting sent out of the field area because the FTA was always asking him to look at something. Sometimes, even they couldn't figure out why the comm link was lost.

If the best of the best can't figure it out then there is clearly something wrong here. FIRST should not provide us with a control system that is so advance that no one is able to troubleshoot. Then tell us we're out of luck when a team that has a 15-0 record mysteriously looses comms in the Finals and they loose it all with no explanation at all.

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Something obviously went wrong. It is not obvious that what went wrong has anything to do with the ARENA. If it was really an issue of losing communication, the FMS logs would confirm that to be the case.

I'd have to argue that when one robot loses comms and another video feed at the exact same time that there something wrong between the alliance station and the robot.....The only thing that falls in to that category that is between the alliance station and the robot that I am aware of is the Arena/FMS.

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

More than one team has replaced their WGA and seen their troubles go away. That's not an ARENA fault. More than one team has confirmed problems with reading joysticks and/or the Cypress board after letting their Classmate go to sleep or when running low on battery power. That's not an ARENA fault either.

We tried to do that. We had the newer bridge and were trying to configure it during matches. We asked a question regarding the WPA or WPA2 setting to the WPA inspector. He did not answer the question instead took the radio set it to factory settings plugged it in to his computer and tried to use his script/program to configure it. He got confused as to why it didn't work and wanted to go watch his own team compete. When we tried to call a timeout to configure it and swap radios the head ref told us no.

We disabled the classmate from going to sleep early in the season. During the final matches used another team's classmate battery because ours was dead.