Before everyone starts whining about the field problems at BattleCry6, lets put our selfs in the other persons shoes.
If your team lost a match on the blue side, and you felt that the field control system affected your play, wouldn’t you want a rematch? If a team had to play a match twice and won both times, isn’t the inconvenience what we call “GP”!
Now let’s address the Field Problems. Just about all events, whether FIRST events or off-season events experienced some sort of field problem, and every year there is something on the field that has issues.
Now with that being said, lets look at what happened at BattleCry6. Since I was not there on Friday Night, I can only relate what was told to me.
Team 121 was experiencing some inconsistent problems, that could not be tracked down to one item. They and the field manager tried to narrow it down to one issue and could not. The field manager even let them test their robot on the field during the supper break, at player station they thought was causing the problem. It ran without any problems. Without any one consistent problem, how could you fix it?
Now on Saturday morning they ran at least 10 match’s without any problems. Then they started to experience some random problems, that again could not be traced to any one item. A couple of matches later the field manager (Who I was told was Gary Fields.) noticed that one of the arena controllers on the blue side was working strangely, with consultation with the scorer, (His son Eric, Thanks to Team #88 for this information.) decided to change the arena controller cabinet.
After changing the cabinet, they found that the system would not communicate with it, even though it was set up at the beginning of the FIRST season to be a blue side control cabinet. They went to change the IP address, and found that the PLC in the cabinet would not communicate with their laptop. Now get this: they called the president of Hatch Technologies for help. ( How many of us could do that? Thanks again Team #88.) He had them change the network interface on the PLC. (I was down on the field watching them.) By the way they did this with Leatherman tools, and Swiss army knifes.
Was able to reset the IP, and we were running again.
During the next match the field manager was watching the blue players station when he and his son noticed an indication that the players mats were acting funny. His son noticed the mat wires were very tightly wire tied to the field player station borders, when the player stations moved the wires pulled, momentarily breaking connection causing the arena controllers to go to “disabled” as if the human player stepped off of the mat. To fix that, they cut one wire tie! (I found this out, when the field manager called someone down from Team #121 and explained it to him, as a possible cause of Friday nights problem.)
The next and last problem was caused by a bad serial cable that connected the arena controller to the blue #3 station radio. Thats why the last match’s were replayed. I over heard the field manager explaining to Ken Stafford, and another person, that He thought that the fair thing to do was to replay those matches.
I noticed that he spent the rest of the matches watching the arena controller on the blue side for problems, and thankfully there were not.
I want to thank the people from Team #88, for their friendliness, what a great team, even when they lost their quarter-final match. From what I could figure out, an alumnus from their team helped designed the field controls and the scoring software. (Regardless what you thing of it, isn’t it great to know it was done by a former FIRST student!)
I know that this is a long post, it is not meant to offend anyone, just to share the information that I was able to gather.
An excellent job by the judges, announcers and everyone else who worked to make this competition a success.