Team 254 Presents: Chezy Champs

[Ty Tremblay]

Originally Posted by Eugene Fang

Many thanks to 254 for adding live data publishing to TBA in their offseason FMS. GameSense, real-time detailed data, and an overall professionally but Chezily (can I use this as an adverb?) organized event -- this is an FRC competition done right!

The GameSense Crew will be taking full advantage of the additional data output by Cheesy Arena as well as the data collected over the 2014 season. Watch the live event to see:

• Cycle Efficiency Ratio (CER) - Average assists per cycle, both over the event and during a match.
• Calculated Win Probability - A weighted average of OPR.
• Season W-L-T for entire alliances.
• CORNDOG (COmbined Rating Notation Describing Offensive Gameplay) - Normalized Event OPR mapped to 1-5 scale.

[magnets]

Awesome job to 254! This is honestly the best I've ever watched. Paul and Karthik are the best set of announcers ever. Combined with gamesense and the cool graphics (both the match with picture/predictions, and the "Head-to-Head" display), the time between matches is just as entertaining as the matches themselves.

Team 254's FMS is far superior to FIRST's FMS system, and the graphics for scores, overlays, and rankings are beautiful and smoothly animated. The color displays above the driver stations with team names are awesome. Pedestal lighting and hot goal lights are correct. Scores update instantly, field lights respond instantly, and the assist counters appear instantly, which never happened before. There are no delays with anything here.

On top of all that, it was developed in months, vs. the years that FIRST has had to work on theirs.

I have a few questions for any team 254 people who worked on this FMS

Do you guys plan on releasing any parts of it?

For the field LEDs, do you guys use the Phillips Colorkinetics that normally are used in fields? If so, what sort of controller do you guys use?

What do you use to generate the schedule? Do you use FIRST's matchmaker executable (matchmaker.exe) or do you guys have another method?

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by magnets

Team 254's FMS is far superior to FIRST's FMS system, and the graphics for scores, overlays, and rankings are beautiful and smoothly animated. The color displays above the driver stations with team names are awesome. Pedestal lighting and hot goal lights are correct. Scores update instantly, field lights respond instantly, and the assist counters appear instantly, which never happened before. There are no delays with anything here.

On top of all that, it was developed in months, vs. the years that FIRST has had to work on theirs.

Thanks. It was a fun project to work on and it was gratifying to see it work as intended, with no foghorned matches all weekend.

For those wondering about the couple of delays on Saturday, Cheesy Arena was picking up on sporadic dropped packets between all of the team's driver stations and robots after all the robots were connected prior to the match. We delayed starting the matches to investigate and looked at the switch logs to figure out if there was any abnormal traffic, but didn't find anything. The packet loss went away as soon as we started the matches, and all six robots remained connected throughout. We finally figured out the root cause during the quarter-finals on Sunday -- the wireless handheld camera from the PNW A/V setup transmits at 5GHz, and was causing packet loss while it was on and in certain positions relative to the field/robots. Since we would switch to the full-field camera at the start of the match and shut the handheld off, the problem was never manifesting during the match itself and so was more difficult to troubleshoot.

We'll be releasing the source and binaries to Cheesy Arena within the next couple of weeks, once I remove the CC branding and write some documentation.

The lights are custom -- the Phillips lights and DMX controllers are prohibitively expensive so we made our own, driven by an embedded processor which was controlled over the field network via UDP.

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

We'll be releasing the source and binaries to Cheesy Arena within the next couple of weeks, once I remove the CC branding and write some documentation.

I can't wait.

One thing I'm wondering is how easy will this be to run alongside the real FMS at regionals, just so we can use the graphics on web streams. Basically we would have to enter the match schedule and hand input scores, unless the new API gets integrated.

The event was awesome to watch live and I thank everyone that worked on it for showing us all how an FRC competition should be broadcasted.

It would be nice to know how much the setup cost for other off-seasons/regionals that want to invest in this. Plus how many people were dedicated to the production experience for the viewers.

[Pat Fairbank]

Originally Posted by AllenGregoryIV

One thing I'm wondering is how easy will this be to run alongside the real FMS at regionals, just so we can use the graphics on web streams. Basically we would have to enter the match schedule and hand input scores, unless the new API gets integrated.

The event was awesome to watch live and I thank everyone that worked on it for showing us all how an FRC competition should be broadcasted.

It would be nice to know how much the setup cost for other off-seasons/regionals that want to invest in this. Plus how many people were dedicated to the production experience for the viewers.

That's a cool use case for Cheesy Arena I hadn't though of. I could add functionality to pull in a match schedule for an existing event, and then it wouldn't be that hard to run it standalone for the purpose of webcast overlays. The realtime scoring for this year's game only took two (albeit really capable) people, and you'd need one more to start/stop the match and control the overlays.

Other than the scorekeepers, we had one person on the video switcher and one camera operator, plus the six-person GameSense crew.

I can't speak to the cost of the production equipment since we got most of it with the PNW field we rented, but their forthcoming white paper should explain it. The field electronics added up to around $2000, which includes the networking hardware, LEDs, alliance station displays, and cables. Considerably less than the $100k+ cost of the official electronics, judging by how much insurance offseasons using them are expected to obtain.

[Metonym]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

I can't speak to the cost of the production equipment since we got most of it with the PNW field we rented

You guys received a slightly modified version of what we used at most events, lets just say our inventory lists are bit messed up right now and I don't know what was sent. But I can still give the value of the equipment we generally take to districts, which is about $20,000+. I'm being a bit generous, there is a lot of stuff that is being tested and stuff we need to inventory before I can really be sure of our gear cost.

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

forthcoming white paper should explain it

Oh don't remind me. I don't know how close we are to finalizing that. The FIRSTWA staff isn't very large and there is always something else that takes priority.

On another note, I sadly didn't get the chance to sit down and watch the broadcast properly, but after seeing the VODs I was a bit disappointed in some production choices. Otherwise it looked great and I congratulate the Game Sense crew on a great first event as a production team. Did the highlight reel get posted anywhere?

[Nuttyman54]

Originally Posted by Metonym

Did the highlight reel get posted anywhere?

I should have the highlight reels posted tonight, didn't have enough time to get them up before we left Cali.

[Mark Sheridan]

This was absolutely the best off-season event I ever been too. I can vouch for 766, 3309 and 3476, they had a fantastic time.

A few things I thought were awesome:
1. The Chezy Arena was fantastic. The pedestal lighting timing, and real time scoring were awesome. I thought the LCD displays for the driver stations were cool and very useful for making sure your robot was connected. Plus there was no arena faults that I was aware of, absolutely awesome.
2. The team of FTAs and mentors that were debugging robots on the field was amazing. They caught so many robot issues, got so many robots running and helped so many team fix their problems. They really made sure everyone got the most out of their matches.
3. The Refs were really good and there were only 4 of them. They made some very excellent calls. Plus they were super nice too.
4. Of course the best MCs Paul and Karthik, they had some really good match intros and play by plays. I am going to have to listen back to all their jokes.
5. The whole gamesense crew took this event to a whole new level. I am still processing how sureal have such a professional commentary at an robotics event. All my students were really proud to hear their name in match analysis. It was really inspirational for them to step into that limelight.

Overall, I was very happy to come to this event. I big thank you for all the volunteers for making this happen. I look forward to the 2015 chezy champs.

[Jonathan Norris]

Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank

We'll be releasing the source and binaries to Cheesy Arena within the next couple of weeks, once I remove the CC branding and write some documentation.

The lights are custom -- the Phillips lights and DMX controllers are prohibitively expensive so we made our own, driven by an embedded processor which was controlled over the field network via UDP.

Cheesy Arena was incredible Pat, I was blown away by it. I probably watched the arena/video setup more for the first hour I was there then the matches. Looking forward to taking a peak at the code.

FIRST is missing a HUGE opportunity to improve their code (FMS/CRio libraries/Driver Station/ect.) by not open sourcing it all. There are so many incredible student and mentor programers that could help build the future of FIRST if they just let us send pull requests... I hope you guys continue to lead the way in open sourcing everything and showing FIRST that a small group of students and mentors can build better systems then they could ever pay for.

[sanddrag]

Team 696 is offering free corn dogs in the pit for the next two hours only, for Facebook and twitter followers. Stop by and get one cooked to order!

[AdamHeard]

What a great event!

Everything about it was pleasant... it's just the little things that add up.

The match timing was hectic, which is common for CA offseasons... but usually we're not playing such good teams every match and have more room to breath!

I hope everyone enjoyed me embarrassing myself in a "Bro-Tank", my team always comments I take things too seriously so I figure if there was any event to be Chezy it was this one. I apologize for anyone suffering from eye damage due to the paleness.

As for our performance, I think it is a great reminder to our students (and other teams) that the phrase , "Fail to plan, plan to fail" is always true. A lot of little details were overlooked going into the event, and these add up to bite you. This combined with the completely unforseeable failure of driveshafts made us play awful. I know my student leaders will learn a great deal from this painful lesson. I hope no one gets offended by this, but winning a non-champs event as a 3rd is not how 973 would like to win events.

As for our drive failures, we started snapping our gearbox output shafts (3CIM ballshifter we turned to .5" round then milled to 7/16" hex, snapped at that junction) at this event and ran out of spares Sunday morning. We actually didn't even have spares made, we just pulled them from practice bot. Similar geometry hasn't failed on us before, so this was scary. This game is far more intense than previous years though. The same shafts did last our 2nd regional and champs for reference. This combined was terrifying to us as we couldn't predict when they'd break again (as some had lasted several events, some had lasted 3 matches). If we broke another in elims we'd have to be subbed out.

For other small and combined reasons, we weren't able to reliably shoot top goal or truss (there was a time lag on the truss release, which made aiming to the HP very difficult). We also were bending frame in a way that made our intake incapable of picking up balls in most matches. All of these will be fixed of course!

I warned most of the alliance captains I could find, because 973 is very conservative when drafting teams, as I would appreciate knowing such risks about potential picks.

We very much appreciate our buddies on 1678 and 254 taking chance on us, I guess it was easier for their alliance to take the risk for two reasons. First, they were darn good. Second, they knew the next seeded team was 114, who was likely the quality of their non-973 options anyway. So if we died, they'd have a decent replacement.

For those accusing us of being deceptive, we're just as good of friends with 971 as the above teams, and they chose to PASS on us knowing the risks we had. If I were any of the alliance captains, I likely would not have picked us (except maybe in 1678's spot, knowing 114 was the backup). I'm glad we broke no shafts in elims, as it would have been very upsetting to us to let others down.

We are also grateful to teams 4543 and 5136 for allowing our scouts to work with you for alliance selections. Our students were bummed that the scouting they practiced wouldn't be useful for guiding picks for 973, so being able to discuss and have some input with picks of other teams was a cool experience for them. Sounds like some of the students made some new friends out of it too.

Watch out for 5136 in the future, they're a team that gets it. They work within their means and are looking to also increase their resources. I'm excited for their potential.

Overall it was a well run event and lots of fun. The humor the Paul/Karthik combo brought along with the reduced seriousness of the event was a nice change of pace compared to the typical event. I hope (and expect!) an even bigger and better Chezy Champs next year!

[icecube45]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

Second, they knew the next seeded team was 114, who was likely the quality of their non-973 options anyway. So if we died, they'd have a decent replacement.

ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ We're decent! ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by saikiranra

Its essentially a page that has team numbers written on different velcro pieces. They make their pick list by organizing the teams on the page, and remove teams that are chosen as alliance selection goes on. The page may also be divided into a few sections, like a DNP List, an inbounder list, and so on. Its a quick, easy way to figure out whats going on and make good choices without looking at data during selection.

I believe that Gary Hedge, who mentored Team 980, introduced it to them.

Yep Gary Hedge invented this back on 980, back in the day. Gary now mentors 3476. Funny thing is Gary's velcro sheet wound up being used by 3309. So both 3476, and 3309 were right next to each other in the rankings, thus were next to each other in line with very similar pick lists.

The 3309 students loved this system and are very thankful for Gary teaching them. Gary uses it to gut check the quantifiable atributes. Its then used as the pick list.