ARENA Fault

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday

I will add that the opposite is also true: it's common for event staff and volunteers to blame the teams' equipment, because the field worked fine in the previous match.

I agree too.

That's the first thing I put a stop to when I was asked to Tech the SBPLI field last year-empty speculation by field staff. If the field staff didn't KNOW what the problem was, they were to refer it to me and not start guessing. It's actually harmful in that it usually focuses troubleshooting in exactly the wrong place. I worked the WPA desk one regional where if they had any field connection problems they sent it back to us to be reset, but I never found even one that was set incorrectly. Of course, the robot that caught on fire was plenty obvious...

It worked out well for Long Island last year, but I still had an IT professional telling me it was a field fault that shutdown only his team's drive motors. His explanation was that it couldn't be his code, and to be fair it actually wasn't, but it also wasn't a field failure. It could have been prevented by adding an error check in his code.