israel regional was a complete disaster.
there was a problem of communication with th router that they couldn’t solove.
in the first day the problem was in low level and we played on the field 5 times.
int the second day the communication with some of the robots on the field stopped a lot of times. the judjes dind’t know what to do because some matches workd aqnd other not. there was a lot of disappointment for all the teams. the final 20 seconds were not exist. the router didn’t work at this period.
in the third day first organizers didn’t know what to do so they cakk to a captain’s meeting. in this meeting the captains decided to cancel all the games from day 2.
when we were at the third day on match 2 the clocked stopped at the middle od the game and all teams on this match were musgt to reset their robot and started again. match 2 was reseted 7 times.
at day 3 it we couldn’t hang on the tower beause the final 20 seconds were shorter.
the finifh matches were after 3 rounds only. we got to the qurter by being selected by another rookie team. in the final we were 3 rookie teams in the same alliance.
my team robot was the only one who could hang at the all regional but we couldn’t hang because of the communication problem. we won in the rookie all star award. it waqs a completely disapointment for us. the competition’s ranks were not reliable.
I’m sorry to hear the field was riddled with so many problem. I’m sure being half a world away from FIRST HQ didn’t help, I hope despite the field problems it was a fun event with some exciting matches!
Congratulations on winning the Rookie All-Star Award! With so many rookie teams at the event that is quite an accomplishment. Do you have any pictures or video from the event you could share with the CD community?
sorry I’m not the one who was whith camera. I belive I will uplod photoes this week.
I was keeping an eye on the FIRST website to see how this regional was going. and i noticed Qualification Matches the 2nd day were expected to run until 3am (Israel time). I was pretty curious as to find out what happened. Im glad that mystery is solved.
This field is a PAIN! Im sure a lot of people who are on the field crews (announcers to queuing) can agree with thsi statement. This is the second year something like this has happened (see qualification times for 2009 here… QM 63). I hope FIRST really takes a deep look into this and makes sure that problems like this don’t arise.
just my $0.02
EDIT: TBA has the original match schedule up on their website. Also, congrats on the rookie all-star award. I hope to see your team compete in Atlanta for the World Championships
every match took half a hour to 3 hours. it was embarrassing and humiliate,
is that happenning in other regionals?
to a lesser extent, yes. I know at the Florida Regional (where i attended). the field malfunctioned halfway through the day friday. and both the awards ceremonies for both days ended an hour behind schedule.
Other regionals that i have been watching via webcast have also had similar issues.
they need to change the system to radio control
Arizona was atleast an hour behind during quals at one point, entire alliance lagged out running two cameras at 120x160
The Israel regional was a complete mess though. We were over four hours behind schedule on finishing the games, not only that each team got a chance to play only 3 games. the final matches were only single elimination instead of double and the semi-final was decided in a coin toss after it came to a tie and we had to evacuate the arena shortly. It was the most frustrating regional I’ve ever been to.
~Kenneth
Now you’re just overkilling it.
Yes the second was a disaster we had no comm at all, but on the third day the comm worked 98% of the games.
Now, I’m gonna surprise you and say that ALOT of the problems were becuase of the teams. Most of the teams in israel simply don’t know how to program their robot correctly. And the proof of that is the fact that our robot worked perfectly. we a comm problem only once. PLUS when i looked at teams codes it was all rubbish, all messed up and not orginized correctly.
People were opening up comms with motors, sensors, cameras, and everything else, without closing them or using the WORST RefNums ever, thus calling the wrong RefNum in Teleop or Autonomous. I think that for next year we should, first of all, give some seminars about programming becuase the level of programmimng in Israel is the worst that you could ever have.
Now, I was in the field for entire three days, nearly no sleep breaks or anything, at the last day we figured out a way to make things work and we had to configure router at the beginning of each game. Believe me when I tell you these Israeli teams are the worst. we give the a configured, prefectly working router, and they have to change it’s settings.
I hope that next year we will be able to use 5Gighz and that should solve most of the problems.
Hoping you’ll understand,
Lior, #2630, Thunderbolts
Hello
We are team 1946 from Israel and for the last three days at Israel regional we had our hearts crushed over and over again as we have been stolen the chance to equally and fairly compete in a fair and honest competition and what happened was a big shame and unfairness to many team got the first two days were a big miss and robots wouldn’t work due to communication problems but we still tried to make the best of it… tell the last day of the computation the announced that there will be two to four games on the chance to give everyone a fair chance under the circumstances everyone agreed and we star and we were bombed for we thought will get the chance to test our robot and ted playing the games went fairly okay tell the last and 3ed game none of the robots worked and they still counted it as a game this $@#$@#$@#$@# us out of the 8 finalist(after we were in first place) although we didn’t play at the finally we couldn’t believe the joke that happened the winners got picked by flipping a coin !! we feel that first sprit got lost in this big ordeal and any team’s biggest nightmare just happened the robots couldn’t perform due to technical problems of communication not because teams didn’t pure their hearts and lives into building designing a robot and spreading FIRST sprit .
We are just one example of the many victims of this shameful situation!!
I have to agree - it was a disaster…
I’m from team 1578, also from israel.
I really don’t know what the problem(s?) was, but everything was messed up…
Our team didn’t have communication problems, even in the first day, but on every game, at least one of our alliance’s bots didn’t work, leaving us almost no chance to play a fair game, and I’m not even talking about winning the match.
It really sucks that our bot was judges by 3 matches - thats only 6 and a half minutes for a month and a half of super-hard work.
Also - i have to agree with Lior. I checked some of the codes of the robots which had comm problems - their codes were just messed up.
Hope that someone up there will do something to fix this in the next regional.
Yaar, Team 1578.
Edit :
For example, the event managers(?? i have no idea who is in chrage of this) can get a couple of pre-built bots or pre-programmed CRios with a simple code, which teams with comm problem can just change a minute or two before their game or at least to check if the problem is in the team’s bot or the arena’s communication center.
I would like to hear from some adults on this.
Clearly, some bitterly disappointed teams came out of it.
But one student (I guess) has already indicated that some of the problems may have been self-inflicted.
so much drama, but I remember there where a lot of problems with the field last year as well as this year. But remember the whole field, OI, and robot hardware all changed and it will take another year or 2 to get all the bugs out.
I cannot disagree more. There is NOTHING a team should be able to do with code on its robot that should bring down the entire field.
If FIRST has not protected itself from this then they have failed.
Having competed in Baltimore last weekend and being an essentially rookie team with very limited programming skill on the team, I can say that the system this year is a big step back in terms of increased complexity and reduced reliability.
Having a Windows XP PC for display is okay, useful, etc. However, imho, building a real time control system with 6 to 10 Windows XP PCs in the loop without a professional grade, real time software overlord on each is like playing Russian Roulette – someone is eventually going to get a bullet the brain.
Looks like the Israeli Regional took one for the team last weekend.
Many regrets.
Joe J.
Well, after being in the field 3 days (including nights) long, I can tell you that there was no one as the Event Manager. Chris, Shahar and I were fighting these comm problems al the time. eventually we figured out how to make things work. Also the match on the 3rd day that didn’t work at all was self-inflicted by one of the robots, incorrect robot code can send loads of errors and since we couldn’t use our strong router these errors made the system crash. we COULD’NT tell which robot was the one with the errors and we didn’t have the time to run a full diagnostic scan.
Problem is that in Israel everyone thinks they know the best thing to do. Hint, THEY DON’T people should stop messing around with codes they don’t know without help!!
All we can do now is hope that our plan to give some seminars will help.
I know people are disappointed but our main problem was that Israel’s goshdarn goverment didn’t let us use 5Gighz so the main server didnt work.
Just to give you guys a cclue about what happened, we ran an Off-Season Event for the robot controls using FMS Lite, and the scoring and sounds and everything else was done by the FMS Server which was not connected to the robots. we had to run them simultanously and manually. so I hope you understand,
Lior
from my point of view it looks like the orginizers didn’t think about that there was not anyone from usfirst who know the field and it’s accessories. It must to have anyone who know the field and it’s elements like the router. One of our mentor built a lot of wireless networks in israel and he said that the router’s place was wrong because the signals got to audience and not to the robots.
The regional sure was disappointing,but the communication problems could be if you program your robot right (we tried to send as least data as possible and we didn’t have any problems during the games,they just took so long to start…)
And about the hanging:
The picture speaks for itself.
(By the way-the battery onlt fell after the game ended so we didn’t get a penelty!)
I am so sorry to hear about all of the problems that were had at the Israeli regional. I know that if I had been there I would have been going out of my mind.
In NYC this past weekend they got pretty backed up with matches that they decided to have both of the awards ceremonies on Sunday night and then limit it to 2 people to pick up the awards when announced. Saturday night though the pits closed at 7 pm so we definitely had time to do awards. I would have preferred that rather than getting home at 11 pm Sunday night. 
For those of us North Americans that don’t know:
In Israel, the 5GHz frequency band that we use to run our robots is a restricted military frequency, and they’re not allowed to use it. This is likely the source of much of the Israeli Regional’s problems, as FIRST HQ and FIRST in Israel had to come up with an alternate solution using the 2.4GHz band. This solution was probably less than perfectly tested, and hasn’t got nearly the mileage on it the our 5GHz based system does here in NA.