Robot Rodeo - fixing control problems

[Gary Dillard]

First, please read my post in this thread about how great the rodeo was:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...256#post296256

I wanted to start a different thread to see what ideas there are about solving the problems using the field - we've had some kind of problem all 3 years such that we couldn't use the field controls for start/stop and autonomous. We got in 4 qualifying rounds with 13 teams - if we're going to grow this competition we've got to do better than 20 minutes between matches. If all 30 teams came that were invited we would have only had 2 rounds per team. It's frustrating to get up at 4:00 am to get there at 8:00 for practice rounds that didn't start until about 9:30.

The regional competitions have budgets of $100k's to get up and running, work out the kinks, etc. - we'll never have that luxury in an off-season but I'd like to hear what anyone has done or if anyone else has had problems with the field for their competitions. We had someone one the phone the whole time and could never get there - still don't know if it's hardware or software. The primary computer would never boot up to where it would run the program, and the field wouldn't run off of the backup computer. Do we need to up the registration fee to pay for someone to fly down and work it out?

As a backup, next year SPAM is going to make a dongle box with a timer that we can plug into the competition ports for all 4 positions so we're all using the same setup - that should help but it's just a workaround. What can we do differently?