disaster in israel regional

[Nadav Zingerman]

With all the fuss about the communication problems, everybody forgot to mention problems that were far more important. The Israel Regional showed a lack of understanding and commitment to the values of FIRST.

The comm problems created an incredibly stressful and difficult environment to compete in. Most teams managed to make the best of the situation and compete fairly. However, the regional had two major Gracious Professionalism incidents:

• I don't know the full details on what lead up to this incident, but after one of our matches, drive teams from team 1574 (MisCar) and team 3076 (Ort Arad) began yelling at our drive team and also throwing food at them. Following this incident, FIRST Israel administration talked to these teams. 3076's captain apologized, while MisCar's refused. At the end of the day, it was announced that MisCar was being disqualified from the tournament, and that they are requested to leave. Our team petitioned FIRST to reverse it's decision, as it harmed those on the team who were not involved. Most of the team later came by our pit and apologized. On the third day MisCar was allowed to play and their captain gave a public apology before their first match.
  
  In past years, MisCar has been an undefeated champion (until '09). They always managed to bring to the field an impressive and robust robot. Many teams, including ourselves considered them the best in the country. All of this makes the situation so much more unfortunate.
  
• As someone mentioned here earlier, all finals were a 1-match elimination, and not best-of-3. The first Semi-Final tied 5-5, and the winners decided by coin toss (FIRST announced beforehand they would do this in case of a tie). While this is an enormous injustice to the losing teams, their reaction is unacceptable. After losing the toss they quickly left the field. Right before the Final match was started, members of Team 2672 (Osfia), and others whose team number I do not recall, stormed the field, sat on the bumps, and demanded a rematch. The students were cheered on by adults, their teachers and mentors. Only after several embarrassing minutes were they removed from the field. Since the final match was several hours behind schedule (even the Head Referee had to leave before it was over) , team leaders for teams that live far away, who had moved mountains to arrange travel arrangements for their teams at that hour, were delayed even further.
  This incident was worsened by the fact that Osfia team members belong to a minority group in Israel, and during this ordeal some race-related provocation came from the audience.
  
  All teams and individuals involved should be ashamed, especially the adults.
  As a side note, FIRST definitely needs to hire better security at the entrance to the field.

As to the technical problems, 1075guy is absolutely right. I hope that in the future FIRST engineers give more effort to a suitable workaround in Israel. The use of 802.11g (2.4GHz) instead of 802.11n (5GHz) more than halved the bandwidth of wireless communications. Whenever too much data flooded the router, it would lose comm. This flood of data was caused mostly, from what the field crew told me, by error messages generated by the Watchdogs in some team's code. The problem lies with FIRST for not preparing for this situation, as well as with the teams who improperly coded their robot.