2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative

FIRST General Forum
41

The control system as mentioned before, I am just echoing previous comments.

The old IFI controller, I brought it home as a sophomore in high school (2001), plugged it in, read the couple of pages of instructions that were available online and it worked without any problems. Programming involved one small program and one resource file.
Now I need multiple files, multiple programs, several DVD’s worth of information, then after I install of of that (which takes an ungodly amount of time and restarts to do) I then had to update several different things, with several different files. It was frustrating to me as a mentor, to our kids it was just impossible. (The caveat here is that I’m the mechanical mentor, but our programmer who really knows his stuff had a horrible time with it as well.)
There was a whole lot of time wasted waiting to see if it would come back on, whether it was rebooting, resyncing the router, changing settings. Way to much wasted time troubleshooting a system that should be plug and play.

The Scoring System
I sat in the stands and tried to explain to parents how the loosing team received more points then the winning team, when asked why, I honestly couldn’t explain that part to them. (This was both before and after the update) It never makes sense to me how the scoring system works, FIRST has tried this several times, in my opinion it just doesn’t work. It is supposed to be a competition. Then add the fact that the scoring system changed after the first week, that doesn’t make sense to me, especially since people pointed out the flaws in the scoring system almost immediately after it was posted in the rooms.

Safety Award
I agree completely and 100% with the award for being the most obnoxious / the meaningless safety tokens.

I just think that they are trying to make it more complicated year after year, when it should really stay the same. FIRST is great at inspiring young minds. I know that a whole bunch of kids on my team LOVE to work with this stuff. They would love it regardless of how crazy complicated the control system was, or how complicated the game is, or even whether they win or lose (because no matter how the scoring system works, the same number of teams still win and the same number still lose regardless of how the points are awarded)

42

I believe it would then be retitled the “Kill Them With Kindness” Award.

43

Dark numbers on the bumpers - red and blue. Don’t use dark colors. Couldn’t see the dark numbers on the webcast.

I’m posting the red and blue bumpers and light colored numbers in the positive thread. They were AWEsome.

Ok, back to the negatives…

Jane

44

#1 we did not pay thousands of dollars to be a field beta tester, have your field issues worked out BEFORE Week 1

#2 if you are going to have all these events, please make sure each one is staffed with competent referees, or at least ones that are wrong but consistent

45

It’s hard to do that when FIRST themselves aren’t even consistent…

46

2 problems:

  1. Inflation of game pieces. They gave us a specific psi in the manual, so why didn’t they stick to that? This gave us nightmares with tuning autonomous, because the flat vs. inflated balls were kicking drastically different distances. Couldn’t they have taken 12 balls, pumped them up correctly, and rotated them every 5 matches to make sure they were kept inflated?

  2. The 1/4 - 1in platform under the bump. It caused so many carrying penalties. Why couldn’t they have extended the wood all the way to the walls, to make an even playing field?

47

This was a big problem for everyone in Dallas. Day one, the refs called everything under the sun. Day two, no penalties are being called to the extent that I hear mentors telling their teams “they aren’t calling penalties anymore”. not good.

48

Control System, DOGMA penalties, and the rivet/bolt heads outside of frame perimeter are my biggest. Starting from the bottom:

DOGMA penalties: During QF1 at Archimedes, our HP placed a ball on the ball return but it did not roll. He then got another ball (We scored like 3 at once), saw the other ball was stuck, and pushed it with the second ball. Both went through together, but the sensor saw them as one. We got 11 DOGMA penalties for that. (we eventually had them removed as a ref saw the mistake, but we had to talk to the scoring table about that for quite a long time)

Stuff outside frame perimeter: We almost failed inspection at Troy and MSC because of four rivet heads below the frame perimeter. A layer of velcro to bump out the frame perimeter saved us.

Control system stuff: This is going to be a long list. A really, really long list.

  1. Cypress board. Talking to Greg McKaskle at CMP, he told me that around 1 in 10 cold boots the Classmate will fail to find the Cypress board and the only solution is to reboot. Shortly after teams alerted NI of this problem they found the bug involving communication with the Cypress driver, went to fix it, but FIRST would not let them roll out an update to Driver Station because it did not affect enough teams to make all teams update Driver Station.

  2. FMS lock. Just plain annoying. What more do I have to say?

  3. Boot times. The cRio itself can boot the PowerPC processor, load the FPGA, drop the FPGA, load it again, and launch the user code in like 5 seconds (it has to initialize the FPGA twice for some calibration things says Greg). Then, the FRC comm code has to timeout on stuff and wait for stuff all in the same thread (so it can’t continue loading while it times out on stuff). THEN, the bootloader runs in a lower priority thread then the user code (sometimes preventing downloads if CPU loads are high) an can’t be run until the user code is running (so you can’t download while its initializing).

  4. Build and Download times: This is a bug in LV RT. It is not designed for downloading and compiling of codes in such a time crunch, and is not optimized to store precompiled versions of files. Thus, every time it builds, it must rebuild the entire WPI library. Then it must re-download the entire WPI library. Almost none of the build or download time is team code. If I want to change an autonomous variable, I have to wait like 5 minutes before I can run it again if I have to do a full build and download. Back in the days of the IFI processor, I could have the code build in 6 seconds and downloaded with IFI loader in 10 seconds, then reboot and wait another 200ms for tethered comm (5s radio). This does leave us with a filesystem for storing CSV files, but that only allows a sequence of events, not calculations or dynamic re-generation of paths. Many teams have asked me during competition if I have had an issue where I can’t download code, I have told all of them to use the No App switch as a workaround and to look for fast loops in their code. I can’t name off all the teams that have asked me this.

  5. GDC stop giving us camera tasks. (Dave, the cRio just can’t do vision tracking effectively). In 2009 and 2010, the GDC challenged us to use the cRio to process images of reflective targets using the Ethernet camera and the cRio. In 2006 and 2007, the GDC gave us lighted targets and a co-processor/camera module. The old system acted independently of the main processor, so any vision delays would not carry over into control lag. Now, vision delays carry over into control lag. We did not use the camera in either 2009 or 2010 specifically because if F’d with timing enough to cause PID loops to freak out. (we did, however, use the camera dashboard this year, and that worked well).

  6. Radio things: The power connection on the radio is not robust enough to handle competition by itself. This is fixed with silicone or duct tape, but still, its going to come loose if you don’t glue/tape it in. Same, to a lesser extent, with the Ethernet connection to the radio.

  7. Breakout boards: More points of failure. While they will never have the fully integrated solution that IFI provided us with this control system, the best they could do would be to create custom modules for the cRio that provide us with specific I/O and let us mix/match. For example, an 8-AI board that has 3-pin headers that we like, or an GPIO module that has the same 3-pin headers, or a PWM module, or a “standard module” that was required, things like battery voltage, RSC, etc. or a driver module for pneumatics (this one could also include Spike outputs). They should probably be powered off the cRio’s internal supply (this would remove all that wiring to WAGO’s and such, but I would live with the WAGO inputs if I didn’t have the breakout boards and cRio modules and 37pin cables and DSC’s. Also, a solid bolt connection would be a nice addition to the spring clips of now (we have actually had modules fall out of the cRio going over bumps, so we glued them all in, but they need a more robust connection)

  8. PD board and WAGO connections: I like the overall idea of the PD board, but my biggest concern is the WAGO connections. It’s not the connections themselves that bug me, but having to reach a screwdriver into the side of the module and having room to move it around to open up the connection is something I prefer not to do (its quite impossible on our 2009 robot, and partially impossible on this years bot). The 2005 integrated PD board had quick-connects from the top, a much better connection design then the WAGO’s of now.

I could give lots of positives to go with the negatives, but this is a negative thread, isn’t it.

49

I have a negative. It directly follows from the above post. While this is specifically directed at the above poster, I’m more annoyed about the general stuff (below the direct response) than missing something that was partially buried in a paragraph in an area that teams don’t generally like to read unless they’re building their field. This is not intended to be a specific attack on anyone, but a general “Wake UP!” call for next year.

Once again, there are a number of teams that did not read the full Manual and thereby missed out on some critical rules and dimensions.

The fact that there was a 1/2" bump was called out in both Section 6.2.3, sentences 5-7, and Field Drawings GE-10002 and GE-10003 (bump and tower plates, respectively). It was there on Day 1, it was there the last day of Championship, it was never changed. They did tell you.

There are teams that didn’t have their relief valves on the compressor (not the storage tank, a hard pipe to the compressor, etc.) as required by the rules when they showed up for inspection. There was a team (admittedly, a rookie team) that showed up with what would have been an active mechanism above the bumper zone, before being reminded by a veteran team that that was not legal. Another team had neither relief valve nor vent valve prior to inspection. The list goes on, and I’m sure that other inspectors could tell you more horror stories about illegal teams from this year. Let alone last year and the year before…

While those teams do eventually fix their robots to be in compliance, it takes a lot of time that neither the teams nor the inspectors necessarily have.

50

I’ve always been disappointed with the video feeds. They are designed to be supplements for people watching from the stands, but they are used for live broadcasts and even for archival purposes. Its hard to follow a tournament unless you attend it. This needs to change. I want FIRST to do more than just “ZOOM OUT!1!!1”. This post is going to be really long.

Dean wants FIRST to become a spectator sport, just like football or basketball. This would be great! We could get more sponsors and share the ideals of FIRST with a much broader audience. Unfortunately, the format of FIRST tournaments is not conducive to casual spectation. A tournament consists of a whole bunch of short and un-related matches played by too many teams to follow. IMOHO, you’re not going to get an arena full of unaffiliated spectators without drastically changing the structure of FIRST tournaments.

This doesn’t bother me though, because I think there’s a better way to make FIRST a spectator sport. Football fans don’t attend, watch, or follow every game that happens in an NFL conference; they watch the games that they’re interested in on TV and on occasion expend time, money, and effort to watch them in real life. This is how FIRST could work as a spectator event.

Firstly, I want a high quality live broadcast feed that is meant and designed to be watched by people who are not in the arena but wish that they were. I would be fine with all of the resources that are currently used to produce the in house feed being diverted to the broadcast feed-- it’s much more important and valuable.

Secondly, I want all of the match footage from all of the cameras to be recorded, archived, and produced into something that an average person can watch casually. Imagine The Blue Alliance with high quality videos and well thought out camera angles which match up with commentary that allows people to easily understand what is going on in the match. The match videos should be organized in a way that allows viewers to enjoy FIRST in manageable doses and in a team-centric fashion.

And who knows-- once a whole bunch of people start following FIRST online (or on TV :cool:), we might start seeing the stands fill up with dedicated fans and supporters who are truly ready to understand what FIRST is all about.

51

I would like to see a list displayed of:

What teams submitted for Chairman’s awards

What mentors got submitted for WFA

What students got submitted for Dean’s list

People work very hard on the documents and the presentations they should be noted for their efforts.

It’s a chance for teams to show others how much they appreciate their mentor.

It’s a chance for teams to honor that really exceptional student.

There are dead times between matches they could roll the lists a few times.

I also think that FIRST should post the submissions on their website of the winning WFA,Deans and CA awards. Most teams put them someplace, but having 66 of them to look at each year would be an inspiration to the rest of us that are trying.

52

In response to the complaints about the scoring system, I think FIRST should use the FTC ranking point system. Both the winning and the losing team, get the score of the losing team for RP.

Personally I think RP is kind of weird, but if you want RP that`s the way to do it.

53

I seriously hope that “it wasn’t in the animation” is the only justification for this. Now, if it wasn’t in any of the field drawings or even in Section 6 (which, as Eric has stated, it was), then THAT is a proper excuse. The game animation is a summary of the game and doesn’t explain the logistics and specifics, and shouldn’t be used as evidence for anything.
(I’m incredibly sorry if this comes off as a mean statement - it’s not intended as such!)

Bumpers - As Jane said, black doesn’t show up on bumpers. Black does not contrast with red and blue. I was disappointed that FIRST didn’t see this problem after week 1 and say “if you wrote your team number on your bumpers with black Sharpie, you’d better bring a paint pen or a silver Sharpie to your next competition to fix them so that we know what your team number is.” On another bumper note, I am both a huge fan of and a huge hater of the red and blue bumpers. It’s a REALLY easy way to tell what teams are on what alliance while watching the webcast. Yet, I miss the rainbow Wildstang bumpers, the bright pink of 233, and my team’s own black and yellow. It makes it significantly harder for some teams to integrate their image with their robot.

Dean’s List - See above. Great idea, bad execution. Nevertheless, congratulations to the teams who were able to throw together some outstanding essays, and to all of the nominees, finalists, and recipients of the award. I can’t wait to see what the future of this award holds.

Control System - I don’t deal with programming and electrical aspects of the robot, so I’m not even going to attempt to comment on it. I do, however, second the voice of whoever mentioned all of the robot skeletons that we’ll be seeing in the future. Most teams will not be able to afford to buy new systems each year to keep old robots running. Using old robots as demo robots is a great teaching and learning tool, and I hate to see that opportunity go down the drain so quickly.

Safety - Unless the posters say “DON’T FORGET YOUR SAFETY GLASSES!” in big, bold, visible-from-10-feet-away lettering, they actually create more of a safety hazard for those who stop to read them. At MSC/formerly GLR, people stopping and slowing down to read the posters in the hallway between the pits and the que made getting your robot down there quickly a huge problem.
The things teams try to do for the safety award these days…geez. There are teams out there who do a GREAT job of integrating safety into their program and are completely safe at competitions, but are overshadowed by those who specifically try for the award at the competitions. I’d like to see the judges look more at what teams do back in their own shops. I’ve never judged the safety award, but from my standpoint, it seems like a lot of the judging has become a contest of who yell out “ROBOT” louder than I play music on my iPod when the robot is still a good 20 feet away than who integrates safety into their entire program for the sake of keeping their kids safe.

Championship webcast quality - Sorry, I can’t watch the matches without the accompanying sound. I can deal with slight lags and occasional discoloration, but if I can’t hear what’s going on on the rest of the field, then I’m watching another division.

54

Exactly why I removed that statement. I didn’t read all of the drawings and specifications, so I didn’t realize they told us it was there - my mistake.

55

I guess you haven’t met me yet :smiley:

I do agree with your post, though. I previously started a thread about higher quality webcasts with rules, scores and standings so anyone can enjoy FIRST. Many people brought up that they would be too expensive to do. I like the idea of better quality video on TBA with different camera angles. But, I’m not sure you will find someone to volunteer to take all the time to do that. We don’t even have enough volunteers to get all the events recorded, parsed, and put online.

56

But if these events became TV-caliber, the # of people interested to help would greatly increase. It’s a win-win situation! (can’t get that stupid song out of my head)

If we’re planning on making this stuff more spectator-friendly, it would be a good idea to change the score display to have a summary of penalties. It seems kinda hit-and-miss with having announcers who describe all the match penalties.

I remember when talking about something else the developer of the FMS said the GDC had planned earlier in the year to have penalties assessed real-time on the score display. That idea was scrapped because it was confusing to watch the scores go up and down. If this idea was re-applied but had a special penalty box that listed number of penalties and a quick summary of what the penalty is it would make it much more understandable to the audience

57

…speaking of negatives…

58

My main complaint is the lack of troubleshooting and reliability between the FMS and the robot radios, and the accountability that goes along with that.

If your robot doesn’t connect after a certain amount of time, they just start the match anyways. Yes, that keeps the matches on time, but is that fair?
How do you tell what the problem is?
I don’t mean just replace parts until it works. I mean how do you determine WHAT is going wrong?
Is it the FMS radio? Is it the robot radio? Is it the position on the field? Is it interference from illegal radios in the pit? Is there some aluminum around acting as a faraday cage and absorbing the signal? Is the signal getting blocked by one of the bumps on the field? Is the impact from coming down off the bump affecting it?
We don’t know.
We don’t have any way of testing.
Teams are told that their radio is broke, and if they want the FMS team to work with them, all they can do is replace it.
But it connected successfully before. What could have happened to break a robot radio? Do they wear out after a few hours of use?

We don’t know.

We need a way of testing this, and testing the fields. Is the only way of testing it to try it on the actual field?
How about some quantitative data? What’s your % packet loss? How long are the packets taking to get there? What’s the signal strength?
What’s the amplitude of 5MHz or 2.4MHz radio as you travel around the field? Are there nodes of strong and weak signal?

What can we do to create a test for these things and make it available at regionals? Very few teams have access to a computer engineer with the experience with 802.11n to make a test for this.

59

I wanted to show someone some video of our robot scoring goals from midfield so I looked it up on Blue Alliance. I knew of a match from our regional that ended 7 - 0 with us scoring 6 of the goals. there was not a single good shot of us scoring. Lots of the nice driver shots and some robots driving in circles but none of the scoring.
ZOOM OUT!

60

What would be nice is some quick and efficient way to reprogram a radio to work with a test field setup. Having an alternate SSID transmitter on the practice field would work great. Running a test FMS setup isn’t that hard to do (laptop w/ basic FMS + wireless router (needs to be copy of field one or similar to handle encryption though) + ethernet switch = full system). If the robot works just fine on that field, the problem must be specific to some different element of the field FMS. It also means a place where you have plenty of time to debug and also look at the hidden information such as packet latencys.