Kymber, this sounds encouraging that Lonestar might one day be a super regional. I know the Reliant Center can handle it if another section were opened up for a larger pit area. Please correct me if I am wrong but isn’t the number of teams at a regional more of a limit imposed by FIRST rather than how many the regional can get to attend? I have always thought that FIRST specified a number of available slots and that was it. At least the FIRST regional registration webpage makes it appear that way to me. X number of slots - Y number of teams signed up = Z number of open slots. I would think that since there were 13 new rookie teams at Bayou this year just from Mississippi and Louisiana that by 2009 it would be very possible to make 80 teams at Lonestar. Lonestar is a great regional and since it is usually the last weekend I would think many teams would love to make it their 2nd or 3rd regional if FIRST would open up the slots. I can honestly see it happening and hope it does!
Actually the limit on many teams a regional can have register is set according to how many teams the venue can accomodate. We will have to expand the pit area but we do have the ability to do that.
Well, I guess it won’t quote a quote within a quote…
But… Judges’ Award- 16
Hey does anyone have video of qualifying matches at the LSR? I don’t know the match number but I would like these ones:
9:50 AM (Red 441 1561 1859) (Blue 16 1867 1480)
and
10:38 AM (Red 1772 16 653) (Blue 1867 1480 231)
I’m working on this. Parsing the matches out is a slightly tedious* process for me, and I have a lot of paper grading to catch up with before professors kill me. Expect them to start going up tomorrow afternoon/evening if my profs haven’t caught me and nailed me to a desk by then.
*Only because I’m so picky. I’m re-encoding the elims I posted to SOAP earlier. I’ve got a better solution for removing interlacing now, and the team numbers are actually legible.
Kevin, thank you for doing this…it is much appreciated. Here’s hoping that you are not nailed to a desk. 
While I’m at it, I’d like to ask my customers’ opinions on this encoding change I’m making. I’m uploading one of the newly encoded quarterfinals videos. It will be called tx_qf1m1alt.wmv. If you guys could compare it to the original tx_qf1m1.wmv file and PM me your preference, I’d appreciate it. I’d like to make sure I’m not making things worse. For those that have forgotten: SOAP Lone Star Archives
Encoding differences:
Original
Uses drop field deinterlacing. Moving objects have crisp borders, but we’re basically dumping half the resolution by dropping every other line. Thus the blurry letters.
Alt
Uses blend deinterlacing. Moving objects have blurry borders. Interlaced fields are blended together preserving info and keeping detail in stationary objects, like the text.
Basically, I’m looking for if the motion blur is distracting or troublesome. looking around 1:45 in the vids is a good example.
Kevin S.
Well we couldn’t have had more fun at Lone Star. I wanna thank everyone that helped make lone star a success, and I want to thank our alliance partners for showing us a good time. I’ll never forget Brazil leading our team in our cheer. Man it was fun. Congrats to 118, 1745,and 476.
Kevin,
Thanks for posting the videos. I found the alt version looked much better. Its much more beneficial to be able to read numbers off of the robots then to have no motion blur. Just my opinion, but regardless I’ll be happy with whichever version of matches get uploaded as long as i can tell red from blue. =)
Thanks a bunch Kevin! I’ve done enough video editing myself to know how mind numbingly tedious it can be. I’m trying to get used to some new contacts, so I can’t really focus well enough to give a decent opinion on the encoding formats. So I’ll go with the majority on that one.
That’s good enough for me. I’ll swap them all out this morning and get on finishing the quals.
Eek. I have all of my team’s matches (16) recorded… and since we just happen to be in both of those matches, I do have them. But, I follow our robot around the entire time. If you still want them, let me know… I’ll try to dig them out. hah.
I love the setup at Reliant Area. It is easy to get to and from the stands and everything is very close to the venue.
Thanks! If you find a way to post them, I would love to take a look
Okay. I’ll dig through the footage tonight and maybe I could just stick them on YouTube and send you a link or something.
Kevin is just now putting up the qualifying rounds. You are looking for matches 66 & 74.
Kevin will sadly not be getting to 66 & 74 this morning. School and all that. I should get to those tonight. The uproar for Q’s was just so great I figured I should post as I get to them.
When I started my post I thought it was the Friday AM matches but when I saw they wanted Saturday AM matches I knew it would be at least a day before they would be up. We have all of the house feed as well except I don’t have anyone with the time / energy to edit and upload. This is helping me share the robot performace with the mentors/sponsors who wanted to see the robot perform. Your work and the Soap site gives me a solid link to send them to.:yikes:
Okay, an update. I’ve got all the matches parsed and encoded or encoding. Unfortunately, SOAP has run out of quota. I’m taking down the huge awards vids since I wanted to chop those up anyways, but that’ll only get me to about match 50. So y’all may have to wait until SOAP gets their hosting bumped up before you have the entire selection of matches.
TubaMorg,
If you still want those two matches, hit up my AIM around 1PM CDT or later and I’ll try to send them to you that way.
Just a bit of cross-posting here as there might be more traffic on this thread:D
Any and all Texas FIRST teams need to inform their State legislators about an upcoming event happening in the basement of the Capitol building. Please visit this post to learn more:yikes:
Texas Robot Exposition in the Capitol Building April 23rd - 27th.