MD State Fair

[evulish]

Originally posted by srawls
we have a mentor on our team that works for nasa that went around taking lots of pictures, but i have no idea if that's who you are talking about. they weren't official NASA pictures, but if you want to see them, I can ask him to post them. sorry the pictures annoyed you, but it's a good way to scout, and if i look at a picture then i'm much more likely to remember the robot than if i just look at "grabs 2 goals, has a tape-measurer extension, does not get balls."

i had a great time in maryland, hope everyone else did too!

Stephen

It looked more like PR photography...like taking pictures of drivers driving and fun stuff like that. He had a nice SLR camera. *shrug*

[Kyle Fenton]

Originally posted by John Larock
For those of you who participated in this event:

What did you think of the playing field? I understand that it is comprised of panels with carpet that are pieced together.

Also, any comments on the control system? I know it is not the same as the FIRST regional competitions.

The NASA group has been working on this field for a long time and we are planning to use it for the DUEL ON THE DELAWARE event. I just want to get some feedback from teams that played on the field.

Thanks!

The playing field was much to be desired, but considering the outside variables, it wasn't that bad. The casters on the goals, even they were new, were often get stuck, and would cause the robots to push hard on the goals than they normally would. The goals also where higher than the field barriers, and often would get stuck if you try to drag a goal near the side barriers. The sides of the field also had bolts sticking out, that we often got stuck on while doing the b-line, this seemed to be only a problem for ball handlers. Also the field was definitely not flat, and had some dips, but again there nothing that really could be done.

I have really no quarrels about the control system set-up. Obviously it was home made, but it worked just as good most of the times. One thing I would suggest is to have a step-by-step procedure to make your robot sync up, so there won’t be huge dealys trying to explain it to everybody.

If you are planning to use this field in another competition than the biggest thing I would suggest is to buy some decent casters for the goals. And I would also try to find a way to get rid of the bolts on the inside playing field side.

[Ashley Weed]

The field deffinately was not an official field, but a lot of hard work was put into it. Casters are a need for the goal, we are one of the toughest goal controlling robots, and I noticed difficulty when I was trying to hold onto them. In addition for changes to the goal, the bolts on it are not correct. Where the bars on the bottom are, in between each one are screws. The screws were not flat and caused problems for robots like us, because when you would grab onto the goal you had about an 1" 1/2 less area to shoot for. The screws need to be changed, or you need to warn teams of this. We ended up modifying our arms a bit, however, it was still difficult at times.
I was very surprised that the field stayed as dry as it did.
BE VERY CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WILL DO. Do not call a match and then 30 minutes later have the judges decide to call it a different way, and do not have another match where you allow a different group of people to redo a match.
Make sure you carefully measure out the placement of the tape on the fields. The distance between the goals should be at 32". The goals should also be set up with the flat side inward, not twisted. Make sure the goals are at the same depth too. Don't have one goal 2" farther away from the player station than the other goal.
Overall it was very enjoyable. The changing of the binary is very simple, and would be faster if people would just follow the directions.

[Matt Leese]

BE VERY CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WILL DO. Do not call a match and then 30 minutes later have the judges decide to call it a different way, and do not have another match where you allow a different group of people to redo a match.

As one of the ref's, I'm somewhat curious as to what you meant by this (if it took place during the final rounds, I wasn't there so I don't know anything about it)?

Matt

[Ashley Weed]

The match that the judges changed was our 180 point match. They decided to only give us 90. I would rather not argue about this anymore but I am open for discussion on it.
Then there was another qualifying match (I think WPI was involved) where they re-did the match due to some technicality or something.
If they did that, then they should of made it clear. They should of allowd us to re-run our match, when the opposing alliance did not show up.

[ColleenShaver]

For our robot at least... the pieced together panels weren't all that great.. the carpet wasn't the same as at the real comps, and it didn't allow our anchors to attached to the ground well. Plus we took up a chuck of it with us at one point.

Also, the plywood driver stations seemed higher than the FIRST diamond plating, and our average height players couldn't even see the robot until it got into the second endzone when in normal competitions you could lean a bit and see it. With rookie drivers it made it hard, because they had that much less time to see they were heading a little crooked...

The controls system seemed alright... as long as you remember to set you channel correctly.

[evulish]

The high diamond-plate made me feel sorry for the middle school team

The channel switching thing was incredibly simple. Switch the channel then plug it in then turn the bot on. Easy as that. (Here I was told I needed to recall my binary knowledge...seeing as how there are only 10 types of people in this world: people who understand binary and those who don't *chuckle*)

Anyways...the playing field was incredibly dry despite the mass amounts of rain. Our rule book took the brunt of the rain (probably soaking up most of the water in our pits)

Nothing to do with the playing field...but unlike Maryland, the pit's should be arranged numerically. It was confusing. I walked around the whole pits trying to see the tiny numbers on the paper in the pits to find the team I was looking for was right next to us

[Wetzel]

Talking about wierd thing with matches, one of ours was paused. A battery fell out with about 35 seconds to go(when I noticed it), Mike Wade told everyone to stop at about 25 seconds. They took the battery out and restarted the match at about 22 seconds. I was just like..what?
Looking for teams it was easier to look at the robots then the offical signage, prolly about 14 point font on a curled piece of paper.
I'm surprised as well at how dry the carpet stayed, but I saw plywood under the carpet after a few matches where it was ripped up. They brought out the staple gun and stapled it back down.
We had one match where we had no data/radio the entire time because Griffen forgot to reset the robot after changing the dipswiches. There was some other confusion around this, we had signal, but on the wrong channel. Swiched it when the guy told us to, and then didn't have signal on the correct channel. Way to go Griffen.
The carpet was used at the Building Musem demo/thing at the end of the build period, and at Elenor Roosevelt in 2001 for their pre-ship testing day. It worked well, until put under heavy stress/high traction situations.
My opinion, as a new driver/part of the flight crew, was that the field was just fine. Thats without comparing it to an 'offical' field/player station. I did feel a bit sorry for the middle school kids, especially the one who's chin was at the edge of the plexi. (I was short then too )

One other thing, another table in the pit would have been tremendously helpful. We ended up working on the bot with it on two chairs. Didn't help that we had standing water on Sunday, and the heat gun didn't do much when there was water comming in. Heat gun worked well on Monday, when it wasn't raining tho.

I have a bunch more pics, if people wanna see them I will get unlazy and format them and upload them.

Wetzel
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/me is listening to E:\Snake River Conspiracy\Snake River Conspiracy - Somebody Hates You.mp3

[Gui Cavalcanti]

There were a lot of neat things about the Maryland competition.

First of all, the carpet was glued down. I thought that was really nice - it provides a nice, even surface for you to drive around on and never bunches up. I think WPI didn't like it all that much, and I'm guessing because their brakes might not have worked as well or some such. The carpet at FIRST events was not glued to the floor (or stapled, for that matter) and so it could bunch up around brakes and provide additional strength. Also, the field was very well maintained - there were people out there working on it constantly after each match. I didn't think there were that many dips or raises on the field...

I think the competition plugs in the control system could have been done better. FIRST released the pinouts and voltages to all of the competition port pins, so technically you could design a control system that was operated solely off the competition port (like FIRST). I think that would be a bit more effective than having to switch the channels yourself (although that wasn't too hard).

One thing I really did not like was the continuation of the slack rules that plagued FIRST last year. Tethers were being deployed directly under goals, wrapping around robots, and everything, and nothing was being called. There were some great tethers out there - 888's Segway and 190's mouse come to mind - but others being deployed under robots and goals were aggravating.

Also, one thing that really, really annoyed me at MD was that two of our batteries are now gone. We took our robot up there a week in advance, and took 4 batteries. When we got there, two were waiting in our pit. The coordinator said he had loaned one out, and the other one couldn't be found (because of the pits flooding one day and in the shuffle our battery was lost). The loaner was never recovered, and the one that was lost was never found. Also, our charger shorted out, probably due to the dampness, and took one of our batteries with it. We were left with one battery! 615 very graciously donated a battery to us, and 116 and 686 gave us loaners for matches and finals, so we survived, but still... those aren't exactly cheap batteries.

The whole standing water thing in pit areas was definitely a turn-off. Having to roll our robot through puddles was not fun.

My $.02

[evulish]

Yeah. The water wasn't cool. I was wearing Chucks the entire time. And who would have known that canvas shoes with huge holes in them weren't water-proof. I noticed a kid in the pits next to us was using a heat gun to dry their pits. That didn't work very well Maybe if it was about 30 times larger.

It seems like many teams misplaced their batteries. I remember being asked to check ours by a few teams. The only thing we misplaced was our robot cart (that was REEEAl hard to find...a big metal cart...oddly enough, there was another robot on it. *shrug*)

[Matt Leese]

Originally posted by weedie
The match that the judges changed was our 180 point match. They decided to only give us 90. I would rather not argue about this anymore but I am open for discussion on it.
Then there was another qualifying match (I think WPI was involved) where they re-did the match due to some technicality or something.
If they did that, then they should of made it clear. They should of allowd us to re-run our match, when the opposing alliance did not show up.

I can't comment on changing the 180 qualifying point match as the decision on that was made after I left. The reason that the other match was replayed was because it was a tie. More precisely, it was a tie that went to the very last tie break (number of balls on the opposite side of the field). In some of the confusion, the field reset team had started to move some of the balls. Because of that, we didn't think that we could fairly apply the tie break rules. So we felt it was easier to just rerun the match later.

Matt

[Ashley Weed]

Any word as to when NASA will actually post results/information/pictures on their site or even do a general update of the page?

[ECarlson]

I just posted lots of new photos, including MD State fair photos. Click on my website link in my tagline, or the WWW button at the bottom of my posts.