Hello,
I was wondering whether or not a official version of the FMS used for offseason competition (with reduced features / requirements) would be made available. The currently linked site (from the FIRST website FIRST Offseason linking to Screenstep) has no mention of a current FMS being developed for Rapid React (or for Infinite Recharge for that matter). Any ideas or suggestions?
Just use Chezy Arena. I have… strong opinions… on Offseason FMS. Real FMS is possibly best if you can get it (needs an FTA).
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I wouldn’t bank on something being released.
What are you trying to do? There is chezy arena which is developed by 254 and mimics FMS. If you are getting a real field, you can use the electronics as long as you have an FTA there overseeing it.
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Vlad,
Offseason FMS is usually published to Screensteps at some point after the official season ends. However, it’s also important to note you’'re a FIRST Mid-Atlantic team (hi FMA friend!) and if you might be willing/able use a FMA field and talk to FMA staff, I’m sure you can use a district field with district electronics and all the bells and whistles that begets.
I’d reach out using the email on their website (from here: ([email protected]))
On the other hand, if your goal is to do a scrimmage without the full field electronics, or with an official perimeter and game elements, you may be able to just use Cheesy Arena like others have said; major caveats to safety, common sense, and avoiding harm as usual apply.
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Out of pure curiosity, what’s wrong with Offseason FMS?
Side note, Cheesy Arena is consistently so much more clean and streamlined than official FMS’s display - as iconic as it is, I’m surprised FIRST hasn’t taken any pointers.
shudders at 2019’s initial display
Can’t clear an E-stop initiated by team spacebars. Reboot everything including the field, it doesn’t clear–and doesn’t show the “not clear” until AFTER the team’s next match starts, so you lose two matches instead of one. It’s at the point where any event I’m at that’s using it, if any team for any reason E-stops, they’re told to NOT connect to FMS, and to run in practice mode. And teams are strongly encouraged to not use their driver station laptop for anything else.
If you have hardware E-stops, the problem disappears… but most events using Offseason FMS don’t have those. The problem also tends to go away at the next event.
The other “issue” with Offseason FMS isn’t really an issue–it’s that you have to figure out how to keep score and enter it properly. That’s just a minor hiccup, though–it’s a feature more than a bug, because you don’t have the sensors anyways.
In order of personal preference:
Real FMS
Chezy Arena (with Chezy hardware preferred)
??Someone else had an alternative??
Driver Station Practice Mode
Offseason FMS (until the aforementioned bug is fixed)
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…huh, that’s a weird oversight. Getting super off-topic here - but for whatever reason I know that FMS is set up to ignore spacebar E-stops, so it must be related to that. That seems like a major safety oversight if it forces teams to use practice mode afterwards (or even discourages them from E-stopping on weird edge cases where something might be sorta dangerous, but in the heat of the match they don’t want to deal with losing FMS for the rest of the competition for whatever reason)… but I digress.
Interesting that FIRST waits until the end of the main season to release Offseason FMS, it’s not like a competition would be tempted to use it over “real” FMS for whatever reason.
Probably because FIRST wants the audience to see the ranking points, which CA doesnt have.
Also, theres that beta FMS that id absolutely point to FIRST’s take on the CA Audience Display.
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@EricH Thanks for the recommendation, we were considering holding a scrimmage and we’re just looking at the options. Looks like a good alternative for more unofficial events that can’t or don’t want to have a FTA.
Start getting the parts together long before the event you intend to use it on if you plan to use Cheesy Arena. We tried to piece it together once the night before an event. We thought we had everything we needed but that was a fail. It worked in the simple network mode (ie single SSID) I have now been working on the attached photos and have successfully ran 3 events with it. I had alot of financial help from the Norther Minnesota Robotics Conference @snoman
Even with out the full CA Rockwell Automation auto scoring the system works great. I had added a raspberry Pi auto ball counter for the 2020 game and am working slowly (in my non spare time) to add color sensors. This required some adjustments to the open source CA Git repo but the fact that its open makes that available.
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If you want to do full bore legit off-season competition FMS Corey is the guy you need to talk to, posted above. He has it figured out. And I am very glad to say he helps out with all the Northern Minnesota Robotics Conference events and we could not do it without him.
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For those going the route of @Corey_Applegate and building their own automated scoring solution, I want to point out that Cheesy Arena Lite can accept scores from outside systems using a RESTful API. The GitHub repo source has docs on the API (see web/scores.go) or send me a DM (I wrote the Cheesy Arena Lite fork).
I also wrote my own fork of Cheesy Arena Lite that adds support for eStop buttons and field lights.
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I would/will like to take a look at your Fork. I was just using the Websockets to send scoring data and was in process adding RGB LED’s with these Websockets as well.
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It’s at https://github.com/kenschenke/cheesy-arena-lite in the scrimmage branch. The scc folder contains a README describing how I built Raspberry Pi boxes for each alliance station as well as the scoring table. The Pi’s run a small Node.js script to control everything.
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