Championship Results

[FIMAlumni]

Has anyone uploaded any match video to youtube or watchfirstnow or anywhere else? Some of us are stuck at work during the days and would love to see some robot action!

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by FIMAlumni

Has anyone uploaded any match video to youtube or watchfirstnow or anywhere else? Some of us are stuck at work during the days and would love to see some robot action!

The wifi at World Champs is not available in the Dome or the pits, and where it is available it is not reliable. Teams probably won't be able to upload any footage they took todau until they get to their hotels later tonight, which might be a while. Opening Ceremonies should be starting soon, and then teams will probably get dinner before going back to their hotels.

[Lil' Lavery]

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

Me, but that has more to do with the fact VA will be moving to Districts than the issues with the API.

[Botsup]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

So you are saying it is the volunteer's responsibility to make sure the FIRST webpage reports scores in a timely manner? Really?

[JamesBrown]

Originally Posted by Botsup

So you are saying it is the volunteer's responsibility to make sure the FIRST webpage reports scores in a timely manner? Really?

It depends entirely on where the issue is. If the issue is with the field at the arena then yes, it calls under the FTA, if the issue is with the API, on the website side, then the blame lies with who ever was responsible for that.

[Kpchem]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

With all due respect, how much of this is actually an FTA problem? Having worked with the scorpion cases before I can understand the computer crashing before the score was committed. I'm honestly impressed that they managed to get everything back up and running that quickly and that they only lost one match.

I think the bigger complaint here is regarding the fact that the scores aren't updating period (except for at lunch and at the end of the day), and that the webcast quality is questionable at best. Neither one of those are FTA related, but rather instead they are problems that FIRST needs to address and probably should have addressed before planning on holding 8 simultaneous events in the same arena. The API worked for many more simultaneous events earlier in the season across the country, so I suspect it's an issue with the uplinks.

I agree with you that a lot of the people here on Chief Delphi complain and don't offer anything constructive or helpful, but calling people out and telling them to go volunteer won't help if the problem isn't a volunteer-based problem.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

I'd like to, and I'm working towards it, but I should probably graduate college first.

Originally Posted by Kpchem

With all due respect, how much of this is actually an FTA problem?

But more this. And don't forget FTA is not a volunteer position, FIRST certification is required.

[Kpchem]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

But more this. And don't forget FTA is not a volunteer position, FIRST certification is required.

FTA does require FIRST certification, but they are still volunteers and not necessarily employees of FIRST*. Having been an FTAA for the last 4 years, I'd love to become involved as an FTA at an event, but being in college has prevented me from spending the time to get the certification.

*Yes, I do know that several FTAs are FIRST employees that go to events across the country.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

I don't think this is an FTA issue. It sounds like it's more in line with the outcomes of the community and HQ attempted brain meshing in the offseason to get a system that works for FIRST and the community. I think Zach Orr and David Carr are two people who are on this board who also participated and they could give more detail about that.

[blockhead]

This is really getting aggravating! I understand having issues the first week but were 8 weeks into this! Regardless who is responsible, I personally feel like there are more than enough people in this development community that could have helped fix issues... and would have been more than willing too. For me like many others who host third party sites its difficult to explain to people that FIRST is at fault because there are no results. Nor is it fun to open emails from very angry parents telling me to get my "stuff" straight when I'm not at fault.

This API has been a let down this whole season...

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

Really? That's one of the oldest and most tired rebuttals of someone who complains about FIRST's abhorrent operations track record. I've been around long enough to remember the disastrous seasons that FMS has been through. This isn't as bad as the seasons that had wrong rankings at Week One events, non-functional automatic goal counters, the infamous schedule-of-doom, and fog horning of matches when too many points were scored in autonomous. But this is week 8. We kind of assumed they would have things working by now, especially since weeks 2-7 were solid and there was no indication of problems heading into this weekend. We're frustrated because we, the 3rd party providers who rely on a working FRC data feed, get slammed with emails & complaints asking why our product is broken, when in fact it's doing a wonderful job of serving up stale data.

Many of the complainers in this topic have done a lot for FIRST both now and in the past. Phil & Eugene spend their free time helping the FRC community by hacking on TBA. I work on Spyder and helped pull the FVC FMS out of the crapper during its first few seasons. We've all done more than enough for FIRST to earn the right to complain a bit.

And as many have said already in this thread, this isn't a problem that can be solved by an FTA. This falls squarely on FIRST IT / engineering and the poor API they rolled out. Early on, it was obvious they didn't have a good grasp on how to implement it properly and on schedule. "Put it in the cloud" and "rely on Microsoft to scale" aren't answers, they're cop-outs for poor engineering.

[Ilovepineapples]

Last I heard it was due to bandwidth issues, not sure if it was venue-side or FIRST-side.

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Mike Soukup

But this is week 8. We kind of assumed they would have things working by now, especially since weeks 2-7 were solid and there was no indication of problems heading into this weekend. We're frustrated because we, the 3rd party providers who rely on a working FRC data feed, get slammed with emails & complaints asking why our product is broken, when in fact it's doing a wonderful job of serving up stale data.

I think this is the most frustrating part. The FRC community is full of very passionate people who are heavily involved. There are people who have mentored FRC teams longer than I've been alive - think about that. Look at Mike, he's been around since 1996 and he's still involved making an awesome app over 10,000 people have downloaded (not even including iOS, stats aren't listed). That's a kind of sustained devotion other communities would kill to have.

FIRST keeps telling us to "make it loud" and there are many third party solutions out there that take this to heart. But it gets really hard, and really frustrating to do that when the platform we build on top of is unreliable, especially at the premier event of the season. The current situation is definitely better than it was in past years, but it's definitely not up to the level it needs to be in order to make the kind of impact FIRST wants (and deserves).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the thing I want to see most in a couple weeks is an in-depth, technical blog post about the issues they've had this season and how they're planning on mitigating them for next season. There is a lot of experience in the community, and there are plenty of people willing to help out, all they have to do is ask. It would appear that all these issues were avoidable.

So yeah, frustrating.

[David Lame]

From my perspective, I can easily shrug about technical difficulties, but getting the current scores and results out to the people outside the stadium just didn't seem to be a high priority.

Ok, so the state of the art, integrated, near-real time solution that allowed all sorts of integration and APIs and updated itself within seconds broke down. Bummer. Now, though, there are (hundreds? thousands? I really don't know how many) of people who would really like to follow their favorite teams during the day. In the 21st century, that's not a hard problem to solve. Fall back to plan B. thebluealliance.com managed to figure out how to make it happen, for the most part.

It seems, though, that FIRST figured that two updates per day was adequate. That doesn't seem very loud to me.

This was a prime case where my ending slogan of a few recent posts is really applicable. Think outside the walls.

I just hope the problems are solved, or worked around, by tomorrow. My plan is to be pretty glued to the computer watching the action, at least as long as the teams I am familiar with (i.e. mostly Michigan teams) are still in the running.