The Palmetto Regional's New Location

[tim-tim]

WOW, what a Regional!

The venue and southern hospitality were amazing. I don't think I have ever been to a week 1 Regional that was run as smoothly as Palmetto. I met a lot of new friends on and off the field, especially all of the volunteers. I was given the opportunity to fill in as a referee, and became really good friends with many of the volunteers.

The FTA's, field reset crew, and everybody else really did a phenomenal job keeping everything running smoothly. Yeah there were a few minor hiccups, but I have seen worse delays in later parts of the season.

Now on to the teams:
11 - you have an amazing robot and team. I wish you well in your future competitions. Hopefully you can figure out your climbing mechanism; that would make for a really deadly combo. Congrats on the well deserved win, and see you at Championships!

245 - I am glad you were able to work out the bugs in the robot. By the time eliminations came around you had one fine tuned shooter. You were shooting lights out all Saturday. Good luck in FiM. I think you guys will do well and have great success.

2187 - a midst a pair of great shooters was another great shooter. You were nearly 100% during elims and couldn't be stopped. Congrats for making showing the world that the 2 pt goal is actually a worthwhile strategy.

2655 - you are an amazing team that continue to great and big things. Keep up the good work. You really are a role model team.

To our alliance members 3824 and 401: It was a fun ride through eliminations. Sorry we couldn't go all the way and win, but I hope you had as much fun as we did. Good luck to both of you in your future competitions. You both will do great!

4451 - you have really made a splash in FIRST. Your robot was amazing, I had a hard time believing it was built by a rookie team. It is amazing that you were able to overcome ~7ft free fall and 20 minutes later climb to the top again. You had one of (if not THE) most consistent robot at the Regional. I hope to see you guys again at Championships.

Thanks everybody for making the event fun and entertaining! Hopefully we return to Palmetto next year; can't wait.

[mwilbur]

Triple Helix, Team 2363, enjoyed our time at the Palmetto Regional. The venue was fantastic -- much better than we expected for a regional at a convention center. As noted elsewhere, getting to the pits was difficult at times due to the single door access to the one side of the pits. The queueing schedule was also a bit overdone, as they often had two matches queued inside the field area and two queued outside. During one set of matches that we had that were five matches apart they were calling us to queue as we left the field. Beyond that it was a great experience.

We would like to thank the following:

- All of the volunteers and judges who put on such a great regional
- Team 1648, Grady Gearbox Gangstaz, for selecting us to compete with you in the elimination matches. We're sorry that that didn't work out better than it did. We knew you were counting on us to perform, and we had the worst three matches you could possibly imagine.
- Team 539, The Titans, for rounding out our elimination match alliance.
- Team 2915, Tiger Pride, for filling in when the Titan's climbing mechanism could not be repaired.
- Teams 1772, 1610, and 1287 for sticking it to us in the quarterfinals. We have plenty of things to work on before we get to Virginia.
- Team 1610, B.O.T., for sharing the us ride down from Virginia with us. It was fun getting to know you guys better.
- Teams 11, 245, and 2187 for proving that good shooters can readily take down good climbers. Your performance validated our own analysis of the game, and you did an admirable job of setting the bar for weeks 2 through 7.

Congratulations to the winning alliance and to all teams that won awards at Palmetto!

[D.Allred]

ROBOTZ Garage had a great time at our first regional! We send a huge thank you to Frank Lanford and the Regional Steering Committee on organizing an excellent event. The Myrtle Beach Convention Center held all 65 teams without issue.

Congratulations to the RoboBees for winning the Regional Chairman’s Award. Definitely a class act team with a great program. Thank you for giving me a personal tour of your automated scouting application. I hope to use it in the future as our program grows.

Also, congratulations to 11, 245, and 2187 for winning the regional. MORT has been to South Carolina several years and achieved a well deserved win to go with your 2006 Palmetto title. I thoroughly enjoyed working with your team and appreciate all the help you gave us. Our first 129 point match with you and 1398, the Robo-Raiders, is now a permanent part of our team’s history. That was a huge confidence builder.

Thanks to our Alliance Captain 3490, Vyper Drive, and team 1539, Blue Eagle Robotics, on memorable elimination matches. We went down gunning (literally) to the eventual champions and there is no shame in that. We look forward to playing with you again at SCRIW III.

Our team definitely enjoyed meeting the in-state and great variety of out-of-state teams. South Carolina puts on a great event, and we hope to see teams travel to visit next year.

Special thanks to 11, 245, 2187, and all the other teams that came to our aid after our semi-final accident. You definitely showed our students what FIRST is about!

Orlando is next. See you Thursday.

[Mr Ryans Dad]

Originally Posted by mandrews281

I just have to share my favourite moment from Palmetto. It's our last match of the qualifying and we (281) are playing with 1598, and 4748 against teams 435/3140/3506. It's a tough match for us (final seedings: 24th/30th/64th vs 4th/46th/21th). We play some tough defense on 435, 1598 does our scoring, and I have no clue what 4748 did. As the match ends, the unofficial score shows 25-14 our favor.

We get a bit excited to have done so well against 435 and one of the kids on 4748 (I think he was acting as coach) starts asking "did we win? did we win?" We start to calm him down by saying we don't know yet and it really looks like the opposing teams has three 10 point hangs, so probably not. The refs come out to inspect the hangs, we watch, and the thumbs go down for all three hangs. They are all touching the ground, so we start to cheer a bit more. The kids asks again "did we win? did we win?" and we say, yes it looks like we did.

He goes crazy with joy. He starts jumping around "we won!!, we won!". It's like he just won the finals on Einstein!! His team mates are trying to unplug their drivers station and he jumps up on their back, "we won, we won". By this time, I heading to retrieve our cart; but I can't stand to watch this kid not get any love back. So I hold out my arms for a hug. He takes a couple of steps towards me and JUMPS into my arms. I have my arms wrapped around his waist and his legs are wrapped around my waist. I think there were some more "we won"s in there too. It's a good thing he was a bean pole, because if he had any mass to him, we would have been on the floor.

A second or so later, he's down and I'm on my way to get the cart. I start talking to his team mate who also has cart duty, and I start to put 2 & 2 together. This is one of those over-whelmed rookie teams. Any veteran team recognizes them. A drivable plywood base, with poles on the corners which held plastic meshing block discs. No dumper, no climbing, and the drivers are still figuring out how to drive it because it's only been running since practice day. They were 0-7. They had lost a couple of close matches, but had also lost a few blow outs. This was their last match of the season and they had WON IT!! The kid had won on Einstein!

I doubt anyone from 4748 reads Chief Delphi regularly, and I still don't know his name. But the joy in this kid just brought tears to my eyes as I read this to my wife, and it has made my season.

Thanks for the great story mandrews28. I was coaching 435 during that match and for some reason a disk got stuck in the shooter. Now I am wondering if someone from above was holding it

Our driver said she saw and congratulated them when she went to get the cart but did not know the entire story till now.
Congrats and great job to not only the alliance but all the teams that helped get them there.

[DRH2o]

Originally Posted by Mr Ryans Dad

Thanks for the great story mandrews28. I was coaching 435 during that match and for some reason a disk got stuck in the shooter. Now I am wondering if someone from above was holding it

Our driver said she saw and congratulated them when she went to get the cart but did not know the entire story till now.
Congrats and great job to not only the alliance but all the teams that helped get them there.

There is video of this match from our loaders head and two others from our GoPro here.

http://www.youtube.com/user/teamtalon1598

[team1102a]

Originally Posted by D.Allred

ROBOTZ Garage had a great time at our first regional!
Special thanks to 11, 245, 2187, and all the other teams that came to our aid after our semi-final accident. You definitely showed our students what FIRST is about!

.

do you have any video of your climbs, and do you have one of the fall?

[D.Allred]

Originally Posted by team1102a

do you have any video of your climbs, and do you have one of the fall?

Barry,
I'll see if we can find some good video of several matches. One of the parents posted our first qualification match with MORT. We were a little slow at the wall and the first pyramid bar, but managed to finish in time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c4R3nOAakU

[protoserge]

Here's the playlist of 836 matches: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...nFbgBEG8UqpKSS

[notmattlythgoe]

Did anybody else at the regional have drivers complain about some control lag? We suspect we were exceeding our bandwidth limit because our second camera was shutting off, but wanted to check with other teams to see if they had any problems also.

[Wetzel]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Did anybody else at the regional have drivers complain about some control lag? We suspect we were exceeding our bandwidth limit because our second camera was shutting off, but wanted to check with other teams to see if they had any problems also.

Check the logs on your driver station, there is useful information there.

[JohnFogarty]

The FTAs told us during our last match that our Dashboard program was exceeding the bandwidth and we had to shut it off. I don't believe that for a second. I'd also love for someone to explain to me with today's technology why teams are limited to only 8Mbs connection anyway. Even the world's crappiest router/switch can give me at least 10Mbs.

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by John_1102

The FTAs told us during our last match that our Dashboard program was exceeding the bandwidth and we had to shut it off. I don't believe that for a second. I'd also love for someone to explain to me with today's technology why teams are limited to only 8Mbs connection anyway. Even the world's crappiest router/switch can give me at least 10Mbs.

I don't know if you were using C++ but it looks like the mandated C++ update that was just released addresses several network usage/bandwidth bugs.

As to why the bandwidth is limited, each robot is running on a separate VLAN which shares bandwidth with other robots, so I assume we're really working under a 42Mbs limit. Your question might be answered in the FMS Whitepaper

[JohnFogarty]

I use Java, and SmartDashboard.

I'll read into that document. Thanks.

[protoserge]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

Did anybody else at the regional have drivers complain about some control lag? We suspect we were exceeding our bandwidth limit because our second camera was shutting off, but wanted to check with other teams to see if they had any problems also.

We had one match where the driver indicated there was a lag in control loop. I do not know if this was field related, but the datalog showed the robot control system was responding appropriately to the input.

We did not use a Kinect during this regional, so our bandwidth should have been very low.

Which match did you have issue with?

[mandrews281]

Originally Posted by Mr Ryans Dad

Thanks for the great story mandrews28. I was coaching 435 during that match and for some reason a disk got stuck in the shooter. Now I am wondering if someone from above was holding it

OK so we had a little help on the defense .

I also noticed this in the team updates from yesterday:

General note: TEAM Members may not lift other TEAM Members in the ALLIANCE STATION (either up on shoulders or otherwise) as this is a safety issue and will yield a Yellow Card per Section 5.5.4.

I guess I shouldn't have mentioned the part about it being a good things he was a bean pole or we'd have ended up on the floor. Even so, with it all happening so fast, I guess I would have gotten the yellow card, and I still think it would have been worth it.