Israel Regional: Captain Meeting

[yarden.saa]

In sunday there will be a captaion meeting with FIRST Israel. They are going to report to all the teams that were copmeting at Israel Regional about their meeting with FIRST US.
I hope there will be a clear answer what happened at Israel Regional.
I will write the discussion at the meeting on chief-delphi

Yarden

[yarden.saa]

Here is the "No Communication" story:
There are not Breakaway fields for every regional.
Our regional was at week 2.
In the previous Competition weeks there were communcication problems that got worse from regional to regional. The highlight was at Israel Regional.
At day 1 of the competition there were not any special problems. The problems showed up suddenly at the evening of day 1.
At day 2 the problems got worse than ever and it got to a time that we had to wait 3 hours to our game. Because of the problems they didn't know how to solove they switched the system to the Off season system. It didn't work.
As a solution they got the most powerful Router in Israel that even didn't get to the market because, they thought if the problem was not the system, maybe it is the hardware.
This solution didn't work. Next, they were turnning off the electricity in the all arena and turn it on back, they turn cellphones, telephones, wifi, actually everything except of the field off. It helped a little.
As a solutin to the Final they were setting every robot at each game manually - It helped to have a regular game but the waiting between each game was a lot of time (I think 15/30/45 minutes).
Because of this we could "finish" our regional and have winners.

First think they know the problem but the official answer will be at June/July by an examination board of the routers company.
The unofficial answer:
There were 2 types of routers on the robots and the router couldn't communicate with them. (I didn't understand it, but I think they said that after our regional the main router was replaced - the other regionals were okay).

After the Captain's Meeting I was satisfied because, I realized there were true attempts to solove the problem.
This Captain's Meeting is openning the door to a new Israel Regional:
There was an open discussion about every aspects of the regional in addition to the "Communication Problem".
Israel regional is going to be great next year!

Yarden

[BrendanB]

Glad to hear that positive actions are taking place to prevent another disaster like this past year.

Good luck guys, wish you the best!

[yarden.saa]

I forgot something:
Next year there will be a limited number of FRC teams- 60.

[DonRotolo]

Sometimes, things have to break before they can get fixed. I am sorry that things at the Israel regional had to break so badly, but perhaps you are correct: Next year will be the best regional ever.

As for the two different kinds of router:
Several fields in the US were having some communication issues because of two different kinds of gaming adapter on the robots. If the "new type" were booted after the "old type" were booted, there were problems. But, if the "new type" booted first, it was OK. PERHAPS this is the issue they were discussing; being week 2, the issue was not well known yet.

[yarden.saa]

Don, I think that's exactly what they talked about. Thank you for the clarification

[RandomStyuff]

It's not exactly those things; It was pretty complicated, having been the only student to stay the night between the 2nd and 3rd day to work on the networking, I can say that it was probably the most improvised system I've ever seen in a production environment:

It was a mix of a series of problems which together caused the fiasco
(The mixing of old and new routers was not really one of them; we rarely had them both running on the field concurrently)

To my understanding, USFIRST sent FIRST Israel a random off-the-shelf router without checking it's settings first (This is due to different wireless regulations in Israel banning the normal router used in the USA). The FTA, assuming USFIRST sent the correct router for the FMS didn't play around with the settings. The router was configured in the most horrible way: default DHCP leases were way to long, even for a normal system (not to mention that there is no need for a DHCP server in this use-case), and therefore the DHCP tables filled up with iPhones and laptops from all over the area in Tel Aviv (the stadium is in a central and busy place, with most phones on auto-connect, it's no surprise!), and the router could not lease IP addresses to the robots. In addition, the router's subnets were mis-configured, both on the robots and on the FMS. The Intelligence Corps guy that worked with us said he was surprised that the robots even managed to work the little they did!

It didn't help that the FMS got damaged in shipping, and therefore the FTA's energy pre-competition was focused on getting that working, instead of checking the wireless.


I think there is plenty to be fixed, but everyone involved did their best in working with what they had available, and I hope the lessons are learnt for next year.