2004 1st (Annual?) Beantown Blitz - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Competition Off-Season Events
1

The good:

Great venue - Lots of room to move around
People and Robot Traffic flowed smmothly from the pits to the field. (For all who disagree on this one I will refer you to the setup in NJ this year where the main traffic flow for people was through the stands from the pits to the field and vice versa).
Competition ran fairly smooth, except for the ocassional power outages.
Lunch was awesome!! Thanks Raytheon for sponsoring that.
Shirts for sale!! Yay!! (But see below)

The Bad:
Where were the signs and/or the people telling us where that great lunch was??
Ugghh… Boston Traffic… lol Tunnels to the Mass Pike? Where did those come from? lol Did someboday say “The Big Dig?” Is that finally done?
10x10 pits when we had all that room in the arena to stretch? You know, you don’t have to go by official FIRST rules all of the time :rolleyes:, especially when it concerns the selected venue…

The Ugly:
Parking = $12?? I have never paid for parking at an “official” FIRST event, nevermind an off season one. Should have gotten one of them BTB Shirts free if you parked there at the arena lot! As soon as they came to me and asked for $12 I asked our driver where that $5 parking was… and grumbled when he said that “cheap” parking was about a half mile away or so and reluctantly paid 12 bucks to park.

And the last ugly thing at BTB was our team’s BAD luck!! lol

Oh well, all in all a great event, hope to be there for next year’s.

2

I think the event was a huge success…
But i do have my opinions…

Good.

Good venue
Awesome Lunch (and great volunteer catering;))
Great feild crew
Knowledgeable Feild Personell, any problem was no longer than a few minutes, or a phone call away.
Cool shirts
Erin Rapacki
NU
FIRST :stuck_out_tongue:

Bad:(

The arena was set up and not allowed a good straight on view of the feild from the stands(shall be worked out for next year)
Pit Table Placement
No “real” defined venue entrance
Boston Busyness
2 Equal sized ladders

Not a whole lot should change, IT was an awesome setup, well run, and a great event. Congrats to all who made it possible!

3

Ladders? Like ranking ladders, or actual ladders? Cause if you had two of the same sized ladders then those were supposed to be used for resetting of the overhead ball corralls, something not every regional had for some reason but worked great for when we were doing field reset at the NYC regional this year.

Oh, and then at BTB there was the FIRST logo that was put down the wrong way in the center of the field and had me all confused as to the correct goal layout when I walked on the field one time. Usually it’s Red goal on Red Triangle side of FIRST logo and Blue goal on Blue Square side of logo. At BTB it was just the opposite, but was correct I believe cause I think the rule was that your colored goal is to the right of the center platform when looking at the field from the players station.
Then there was that weird long bolt that was on the scoring table side of the bar.

4

That was done because during field setup the platform wouldn’t fit the correct way.

5

The thought process behind this was that it was more beneficial to allow vehicles enough room to navigate.

For those who weren’t there or didn’t know… Teams were allowed to drive their trucks into Matthews Arena to unpack right next to their pit.

Satire:
It’s unsafe for the field crew to use a ladder to reset the ball corral, but is completely safe for random people to drive their trucks through the pit area.

6

If we had 1/4-20 4" long bolts we would have used them :slight_smile:

Tom

7

The Beantown Blitz was great! Our team had a great time! I only have good things to say about the Blitz. We host Fall Fury, and I am the one who does all the planning for that so my hat goes off to all of you who put the Blitz together. You guys did a great job! Planning an offseason competition is one of the hardest things to do. There is so much work to be done and not everyone sees/knows what it is, so thank you to all the Blitz workers for putting on a great event.

On to the good:
Arena was nice
Well organized
Teams there were great, Friendly and competitive.
Location was easy to find.
BBQ lunch was awesome! Thank you!
Parking Garage was convenient. (we paid $17.00 to park all day, BUT we also went to the Red Sox game after the Blitz so we parked there until 11:30pm)
I liked the addition of the 10 point balls into the game, made it interesting! (we may borrow this idea for Fall Fury).

I do have one bad thing, (that you guys had no control over)
No whistles should be allowed! There was one person there who blew a whistle whenever their team was competing, It was so LOUD! I am all for cheering your team on but boy those whistles can really hurt your ears!
In all, I thought the Blitz was a huge sucess and we are definately planning on returning next year!

8

The Good: Um…just about everything…great competition, great teams, nice venue, city life(no cows walking down the street :ahh: ), Tagging Erin’s Segway…the last one wasn’t me :stuck_out_tongue:

The Bad: NOT the 2nd Annual BTB!!!
Needed signs to BBQ (we just followed Elgin)

9

First of all, I want to thank Erin and everyone else for putting on another great New England off season Competition. A special thanks goes out the NU Dean of Engineering for being so supportive of a FIRST event at Northeastern. He was at the event the entire day and I heard that he was also there on Friday for set-up. I thought the event was very well run for its first year and also could use some small improvements.

The goods:
The lunch!: Being a college student, and knowing that every college student loves free food :slight_smile: , I thought that having the free lunch was excellent. My one suggestion would be to have more than one table serving the food. The line for food got extremely long.

The Arena: that it was held at was a good size, plenty of room, but not so big that it felt empty.

Location: To hold an event in Boston means that you are going to have to drive in the city. The venue was only a few blocks from the highway off ramp.

Staff: I thought there was an experienced staff running the field/reffing/announcing/scorekeeping etc. They made the event run smoothly.

Irregular Randomness: The ref switching/dueling announcers and other actions that occurred at beantown, which do not usually occur in the regular flow of the rounds made things interesting for those in the stands.

WOODIE!: I thought that it was great that Woodie made an appearance. Although we all know he is a busy man, I wish he had stayed longer.

Needs Improvement:
Parking:
I will have to agree with Elgin that the parking was outrageous. I parked in the Gainsboro garage as instructed by the Beantown website and paid $16 for the day. Given I would pay it again to come help out at a FIRST event, but I think if something can be done to reduce the price of parking it should be.

Where were all the people? :
With a population of over 500,000 people, and many Northeastern students still on campus, holding an event in Boston could attract many more spectators than I saw in attendance. I noticed that none of the Beantown Blitz signs said “Robotics Competition” and therefore the general public did not know what the event one by just reading the signs.

Running behind:
Almost every off season event I have been to runs slightly behind schedule, as did this one. It is very difficult to fit enough qualifiers and the elimination rounds into one day. I noticed that many people had left before the awards ceremonies due to the fact that they had a long drive home and the competition ran a little over. I think this took away from the awards ceremony slightly.

I believe this is my longest post ever… Anyway I hope this helps make next years Beantown Blitz even better than the great event that it was this year.

Eric

10

The Good :

  • Free Parking (if you went to the back parking lot where all the robots where brought through, a lady directed us to some parking that was just across the train tracks hosted by NEU =D…
  • Free Lunch Hosted by Raytheon (THANK YOU!!!)
  • The idea of having the 10pt ball in play at all times… it kinda makes you want to at least try to heard for those few extra points!
  • Venue - Was AWSOME!!! hoping to expect a few more teams next year making the stands a little bit more filled and hopefully publicized a little bit more to get FIRST more widespread!

The Bad :

  • The pits still seemed a little bit croweded even when we had an end pit table.
  • No annoucements for teams and when thier matches were… it was kinda nice to have people come to our pits, but i think that it would be nicer to have calls and maybe start queing a match earlier to give teams a little bit more time to finish!!! PLEASE!!! (we only had 2 pit people and me, who just helped where i could, and we acutally had our pit man, on TOP of our cart, being dragged to the field while still fixing it on the way to our last qualifaction match =X
11

I have to agree with you here. I was on queing, and it was a bit hectic running around tracking down teams to get to matches, especially for teams working on repairs. I’d have loved a pit announcer station where we could just announce the teams needed.

We tried to keep 2-3 matches in que ahead of the match in progress, and generally I think it went pretty well. Things flowed pretty smoothly once everyone got used to the layout. Great job keeping the flow everyone! Made our jobs easier and much more fun!

12

Ugghh… Boston Traffic… lol Tunnels to the Mass Pike? Where did those come from? lol Did someboday say “The Big Dig?” Is that finally done?

Boston Traffic makes New Yorkers look sane. Ive been there twice and its quite interesting watching people scream in the middle of the streets yelling at cars to yeild.

13

My rather lengthy dissertion on the subject can be found here, in the other BTB thread, if anyone is interested.

In summary:

The Good
Erin.
839 and 69, for their help and support.
Northeastern & Raytheon.

The Bad
Occasional but prevalent inaccurate refereeing (see my other post for a detailed account).

The Ugly
My teams luck. Urgh.

–Petey

14

Good
-The Venue, it is better then many regionals i have seen.
-The Organization, This event was organized beyond what anyone could have dreamed for a first time off season competition.
-The Crew, All the volunteers, refs, organizers, Scorekeepers (myself), que-ers, judges and other event staff were top notch professional people, doing what they love to do best and knowing what they were doing.
-Fixes for Problems, What happened and occured as problems werre fixed immediatly and also normally did not reoccur.
-the event flow, not only did we have an extremly well flow of peoples and robots but also the event for more or less stayed well on schedule and also did not have many problems when it xcame to the matches.
-the scoring system, as i can attest to as being the lead scorekeeper, i would like to thank rick and pete for helping fix the problems we did have occur with the system but once we got it up, it ran almost flawlessly.
-the field, Even though we did have problems rise from previous use of this field when we were setting it up, this field worked amazingly and didnt have any true field problems during the event.
-The Lunch, Thank you NU and Raytheon for hosting the lunch bbq and for supplying the area to hold it in.
-The Teams, We had some of the top notch teams competing at BTB and i would like to personally thank each and everyone for making this event what it was.
-ERIN!, thank you erin for all your blood sweat and tears you put into this event, what was seen and what wasnt, i cant wait for 2005;)
-BIG Red Buttons, Thank god they work…Yeeeeeeeeeeessssssss!!!

Bad
-that this was only a one day event;) i would love to still be there now.
-The few field power problems that occured, i cant say they could have been stopped but what i can say is that i wish that they could have occured not during a match.
-no pit announcer, from what i saw of the quers, is that they could have all used segways(right greg) cause they didnt have a pit announcer and were going from pit to pit to que teams.

Ugly
Nothing!!!

15

I know… I don’t know who that was… She was I guess supporting our team… Most of us have never seen her before and it really was annoying… We tried to get her to stop but I don’t know… I had no clue on who she was… She was wearing our shirt and sitting behind us… I’m so sorry for the whistle… We had no idea on how to get her to stop because we did not know who she was… I’m definitly going to talk with the team leader and see about that… Again I’m sorry for that absurd noise… I promise the whistle will not be at the next event we go to or anyother that we go to…

my thoughts on the competition-
it was perfect!!! I have no complaints accept for the whistle that was there for our team… It was a great comp. and I hope it will continue to run year after year… Great job to Erin and all that made it possible…

Also: I don’t know about anyone else but we had no problem getting to the BBQ… we followed the signs… hmmm… We just used the map that was given to us… FOOD WAS GREAT!!! Loved the boston baked beans!!!

Bad thing-
I forgot to get a shirt!!! :0(

16

I have seen one Bad come from Beantown Blitz.

all the bickering and slandering, it should stop. there is no biased decisions made by the refs. so all rules are LEGAL. Any decisions made by the officials should be kept to the feild, and not tossed around like a pack of wild dogs. PLEASE, keep FIRST about the kids, and engineering, and not follow the footsteps of every other sport. Lets just all have fun

Greg

17

How is it that when the guys from FIRST do ref’ing, only a few contained incidents come up, but when another team is doing it, Huge things are argued over?

18

You know what guys… I’m sorry I lied… There was one thing that really kinda bothered me… Our first three matches were with 121 in one match and against them in two… We played with and against teams over and over… We played with like 10 other teams… Teams we didn’t even see on the field at the same time as us were 571, 61, 190, 175, 213, and many many other great teams… I don’t know… Next year I would love to see the matches spread out more and not see the same teams over and over again…

19

33 teams total with 4 teams on the field at a time with the same amount of time between teams matches caused the scoring system to generate matches that were not so random… Yuo want to be more spread out next year then get more teams to come!!!

All these refs were picked from the utc, long island and another regional i think. They all were refs this year at one or more FRIST regionals with soem even beign refs at the championship, they arent just “another group of people”.

20

Well Dez its not that… We played 7 matches… with 3 other bots on the field… thats like 21 teams there… but we played with some teams like 3 times and like 2 times and some teams we never got to see…